2020-1-22 Meeting notes

Let’s talk about:

The new ArchivesSpace Help Center and user manual

• The User documentation sub-team will continue to add updates to current user manual pages and pages including new content

• The team is looking at ways to integrate other ArchivesSpace resources (like the tech documentation) into the user manual.
  
  

User Documentation Sub-team

The results of the Development Prioritization survey

• Review the survey summary at https://archivesspace.org/archives/5821

Lydia Tang, Development Prioritization sub-team

Yale’s approach to the PUI, specifically the collection organization tab which resolves some accessibility and usability challenges with the PUI- Found at https://archives.yale.edu/

Yale’s usability report and presentation

• Yale’s Github with plugins and  Yale ArchivesSpace Committee

• A lib-guide which shows a bit more of what Yale is doing with ArchivesSpace: https://guides.library.yale.edu/archivesspace/home

Eve Neiger, Yale University

Can you help me with:

Multi-repository set ups in AS. There's a lot of sharing between repositories (eg agent records) which is really helpful, but some seems less so (eg location records, container profile records, location profile records). I'm worried about scaling up here- will it be feasible to use AS for location management by 30 separate repositories if each repository can see each other's location records?

View Harvard’s container management enhancement proposal here:

Open

Eve Neiger recommends developing a group of stakeholders at your repository to meet regularly and agree on how to input information into ArchivesSpace for consistency.

There was also a recommendation to try and identify aa group of ArchivesSpace users who are dealing with issues related to managing multiple repositories within in ArchivesSpace. Maybe a call on the users group?

Natalie Adams, Cambridge

User accounts and changing passwords: we're setting up around 80-100 new users on AS and are finding it challenging because the users can't change their passwords.

• Managing user permissions and accounts is an area of development focus right now. There are lots of JIRAs relating to this, including this one about passwords. ANW-534: As a user, I want to be able to change my own username and passwordClosed-Complete

• Please watch JIRAs that already exist and offer comment as appropriate

Natalie Adams, Cambridge

How do people work with vendors to customize AS? Any tips of those who have gone through the process be it vendor selection, requirement prep, relationship management etc would be of interest to me.

Eve Neiger (Yale) spoke about a specific vendor relationship and recommends thinking through what you hope to accomplish with the vendor using the specific example of developing use cases or user stories. She also recommended staying in frequent communication and getting quotes and estimates as you work. It can become complicated when dealing with vendors in different timezones. Yale has one point of contact for vendor communication. The ArchivesSpace stakeholders all meet and discuss before changes are made but everything is funneled through one point of contact.

Mary Haberle, Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts

What do you wish you had known before importing legacy data? What setup issues MUST I do?

• Do as much advanced prep/clean up as possible

• Use a test instance to play in and test everything before going into production.

• “One important thing we’ve realized is that if an accession record or a digital object is in one repository, and a resource record is in a a different repository, the links are lost.”

• “data clean up can be challenging, so try to get it right the “first” time

• “We didn't realize at first that Accessions records weren't required. We can't use AS for accessiion records, so not having to create them anyway was a great time saver!”

• “Kate pointed me to this article-https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/30356833 so helpful to us, especially for extents. We're copying the 1xcollection approach to some of our odder physical extent records...”

• “try to assess ease of data cleanup pre and post migration. In many cases, it's much easier to clean up before migrating”

• “Have a strategy!”

• “Make sure key stakeholders (often line staff) are involved to recognize issues/problems.”
  
  

VivianLea Solek, Knights of Columbus Supreme Council Archives

I have an idea:

Wouldn't it be great if assessment records included action/trigger dates? Meaning that you could check when an assessment needed review.

Both this and the idea below are great candidates for new JIRAs. You can create a new JIRA by following these steps:

How to Request a New Feature

Natalie Adams, Cambridge

We think it would be helpful if assessment records included 'external documents' so that we could link assessments directly to more detailed records. Would this be useful to anyone else?

Natalie Adams, Cambridge

Other topics, on the fly conversation:

Is there a need for Rights Statements to publish to the PUI? Should a ticket be created?

Are user defined fields only available at the resource level? Should a ticket be created?

I was reading the documentation and it said that development was expected for a batch EAD export feature. Would something like this be possible on the staff interface?

• RE: batch EAD export (assumes you have admin access): https://archivesspace.github.io/archivesspace/user/archivesspace-repository-ead-exporter/

Does anybody use events?

• “I only use Events to track unprocessed/processed collections
  'processing new' vs. 'processing complete'“