Ideas related to Governance
Idea | Next Steps | Progress |
Have representation from Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Hispanic Serving Institutions on the Governance Board or create specific seat on the Governance Board for a representative from HBCUs/HSIs. | We are proposing that Governance charge a small internal task force to investigate options and models for improving its own diversity before undertaking any of these specific actions. | NOT STARTED |
Provide one-on-one mentoring to potential and new Governance Board representatives to provide more support and/or a longer runway to service. | Many thought this was a good idea for Governance in general. | IN PROGRESS |
Explore the creation of a standing DEIA Council. | This came up in a comment in a feedback form response and did not receive wider discussion. This idea may be coupled with other initiatives. | ON HOLD |
Ideas related to program and membership*
Idea | Comments | Next steps | Progress |
Subsidize membership for some grassroots organizations, community archives, tribal archives, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs). | A recurring theme of the comments in the discussions and feedback was that these really should be offered together, since ArchivesSpace implementation and full participation in the community is best accomplished with lots of support. | We are proposing a pilot program offering an implementation package including all of these resources for up to three organizations, with a slow rollout beginning in the fall.
| IN PROGRESS |
Subsidize or offer assistance with self-hosted or hosted ArchivesSpace installations for some grassroots organizations, community archives, tribal archives, HBCUs and HSIs. | |||
Develop a training toolkit for grassroots organizations, community archives, and tribal archives that want to use ArchivesSpace, or develop an infrastructure for community members to create and disseminate resources to assist grassroots organizations, community archives, and tribal archives. | |||
Develop a new membership tier for minority serving institutions that evaluate each institution on a case by case basis, offering membership at a rate more appropriate with the institution’s capacity and not based on JSTOR classification. | This does not mean institutions will be offered discounted rates. While some members may qualify for subsidized membership, this membership tier will function as a way to evaluate minority serving institutions more fairly and provide them with equitable access to membership. Some MSIs may qualify for the free pilot program mentioned above, others may qualify for membership at the rate appropriate for their size and other will fall somewhere in between. | NOT STARTED This is a recent community suggestion and has not been discussed at the governance level. | |
Explore the creation of a cloud-based centralized ArchivesSpace or consider consortial membership to allow grassroots organizations, community archives, tribal archives, HBCUs, HSIs and other less resourced organizations to share financial and infrastructure commitments. | It is not clear how much demand there is for this, and to what extent this is already possible in other ways through finding aid aggregators. More research is needed. |
| ON HOLD |
Provide greater diversity in the examples used in the user documentation. |
| User Documentation sub-team will work on this. | NOT STARTED |
Work with organizations and groups that help others understand ethical collecting and archival description to identify best practices for using (or not using) ArchivesSpace and related barriers in the application. |
| We are working on a series of conversations and partnered webinars beginning late 2020/early 2021. | IN PROGRESS |
Regularly spotlight the work our members do in their communities, via mechanisms such as features in our monthly updates and posts on our blog/Twitter. | We will incorporate this kind of feature into Monthly Updates and also look to signal boost relevant posts on social media. | IN PROGRESS | |
Provide greater support for learning ArchivesSpace and archival information management to BIPOC students in archives and related educational programs. | This is already on our to-do list for the year, though it had been postponed by the COVID-19 crisis. Previously identified Board and program group can convene to discuss by the end of 2020. | IN PROGRESS | |
Commit to virtual networking and programs as a way to support the global community of ArchivesSpace, including under resourced institutions in the Global South. | While wider global expansion remains a goal, this has been somewhat backburnered by the COVID-19 crisis. We do plan to offer our engagement programming virtually until it is over. We are committed to continuing to provide virtual networking opportunities like the ArchivesSpace Online Forum. | IN PROGRESS |
* A fundamental principle of ArchivesSpace is that those who can contribute, whether financially or with their time and talents, do so in order to make what ArchivesSpace makes possible possible for everyone. That core principle is essential to ArchivesSpace being sustainable as a program, application, and community, but there are different ways we as a community can bring people in to broaden the conversation, open up possibilities, and be a force for more good. ArchivesSpace is committed to remaining free to download and use and makes almost all of its resources freely available. ArchivesSpace’s member model supports the continuing development of the application and services and resources that support the community that uses it. Organizations that elect to become ArchivesSpace members receive member benefits including access to the Help Center, listservs and technical support. ArchivesSpace membership ensures that the ArchivesSpace application is sustainable and available to all archives and archivists.
Ideas related to application
Idea | Comments | Next steps | Progress |
Convene a working group to develop a thesaurus or glossary and create examples of antiracist descriptive practice. | This was felt by many to be outside of ArchivesSpace’s purview. There are good examples to point to in the wider archives and cultural heritage community. | Add information about other efforts in this area to a resource page keeping track of our antiracism and inclusion efforts. | COMPLETED If you would like to contribute or make a suggestion to this resource list, email ArchivesSpaceHome@lyrasis.org. |
Provide guidance on which fields to use for disclaimers on material containing racist, sexist, and offensive language or content. | Some of the feedback pointed out that this is primarily a descriptive standards issue, not really an ArchivesSpace issue. | Add information about other efforts in this area to a resource page keeping track of our antiracism and inclusion efforts. | COMPLETED Resources available at Antiracism and Inclusion in Archives Resource List If you would like to contribute or make a suggestion to this resource list, email ArchivesSpaceHome@lyrasis.org. We will also work with relevant community groups to incorporate guidance from DACS on this issue into our user manual, tool tips, and training materials. |
Eliminate coding terminology that echoes racist language such as "master" and "blacklist/whitelist". | We are investigating tools that GitHub has made available to make this process easier from a technical standpoint, and will work on reeducation within our community. | IN PROGRESS | |
Explicitly acknowledge in the application that there is inherent bias in the application and make it clear which who can access records and fields in ArchivesSpace and how. | We will add a statement to our GitHub repository. | IN PROGRESS | |
Convene a working group to examine unconscious bias and barriers to entry in the ArchivesSpace application, particularly related to language and privacy. | A lot of this work is being done through the discussions themselves. Creating specifications for issues that had surfaced and beginning work toward development would better retain momentum and achieve progress. | Creating specifications for issues that had surfaced and beginning work toward development would better retain momentum and achieve progress.
Program team will work on specifications for many of these ideas, calling in community members as needed. Program team will then work to estimate the staffing and cost associated with them. | IN PROGRESS |
Ability to choose simplified templates for data entry, import, export, and display in the public user interface. | A common theme of the discussions was that ArchivesSpace can very complicated for an inexperienced user, especially a non-archivist. The ability to use simplified templates and views for some functions would significantly lower the barrier to entry.
This type of functionality is often requested in other contexts as well. | NOT STARTED | |
Develop a scaffolding or infrastructure to make redescription work or antiracist description work easier within ArchivesSpace. | Specific items mentioned included: · bulk editing · full audit trail · additional fields for tracking work
Some of this work is perhaps too complex to undertake or the function can be achieved in the application in part already, but bulk editing is one of the most requested features in the application in general. | NOT STARTED | |
Allow for versioning of all record types in ArchivesSpace to document the changes made when doing redescription work and a way to provide the context for why the change was made. | This is probably the most difficult of the ideas technologically because it may require rearchitecting the application. | NOT STARTED | |
Create a mechanism to provide trigger or content warnings at both the resource and archival object level. | It is already possible to manually provide a trigger warning as text within a field or note, or a blanket statement within an ArchivesSpace deployment. Discussions suggested taking this farther by having a way a warning could appear more prominently on a record (particularly in the PUI) and being able to invoke it as needed throughout the application. | NOT STARTED | |
Provide a mechanism to allow users to submit a correction/edit to a finding aid or annotate finding aids. | Some commenters pointed to a recommendation on page 6 in the recommendations for Anti-Racist Description Resources from Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia: https://archivesforblacklives.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/ardr_final.pdf | NOT STARTED | |
Provide support for description in multiple languages and more translations of the interface. | This has been raised in many contexts previously and would support ArchivesSpace’s growth as well as commitment to inclusion. | IN PROGRESS If you are interested in contributing a translation of the ArchivesSpace interface, please email ArchivesSpaceHome@lyrasis.org | |
Provide a way to make agents repository-specific or viewable by only some users. | This is also probably quite complex to implement. This could be part of a larger set of changes related to multi-tenant support, which would require significant architecture changes. | NOT STARTED | |
Enable the use of Traditional Knowledge (TK) labels on indigenous cultural heritage materials. (https://localcontexts.org/tk-labels/) | TK labels are useful for institutions implementing the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials (http://www2.nau.edu/libnap-p/protocols.html), guidelines for sensitive and ethical management of indigenous materials which were endorsed by SAA in 2018.
| Program team will consult with some experts within and outside the current community about these needs and write specifications. For the purposes of funding, these ideas could be considered a subset of a larger development project, or a development project of its own. | NOT STARTED |
Explore ways to better support integration with Mukurtu (https://mukurtu.org/) for those organizations using both Mukurtu and ArchivesSpace or needing to exchange data with other organizations that use one or the other. | Mukurtu is an open source collection management system specifically aimed at sharing digital content in “culturally relevant and ethically-minded” ways. It is often used by institutions that work with indigenous cultural heritage materials. | NOT STARTED | |
Add a mechanism for authentication in the public interface. | Some archives want to be able to share some information about their collections with some users but not everyone, when those users don’t share a common IP address or domain or something else that otherwise might be used to restrict access to a website. This is a common issue for tribal archives who have little IT support. | NOT STARTED | |
Provide better support for right-to-left (RTL) scripts, ideally bi-directional text. | ArchivesSpace does already provide some support for right-to-left scripts already but comments indicated that it is insufficient for some needs. | We will convene a small working group to investigate this issue and provide a specification. | IN PROGRESS |
Add fields for variant terms and a function that allows us to make the variant term the local display term when the LCSH term is deemed harmful. | Subjects have always been one of the simplest kinds of records in ArchivesSpace. Expanding the subjects module has come up in discussions for several years, for a range of reasons. | We will convene a working group on expanding the subjects module, with a particular focus on concerns related to inclusion. | NOT STARTED |
Provide mechanisms to better support non-LCSH authority term imports. | While not entirely related to expansion of the subjects module, it will be important that the subject record in ArchivesSpace be able to accommodate data points prevalent in the chosen controlled vocabularies. | NOT STARTED |