Archivists Toolkit and Archon Roundtable Meeting
For my first official SAA activity this year, I went to a discussion of the development of ArchivesSpace. This project, funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation will be released in beta in June 2013. In the meantime, smaller releases will come out and the code will be made available through Github.
While the liasons between ArchivesSpace- Mark Matienzo and Katherine Kott- can’t say for certain what emphasis will be placed on both back end workflow versus front-end user interface, the hope is that both pieces will be released and easily implemented.
The developers have been working with LYRASIS, who will host the product, once it’s released. There will be no membership fees associated with this hosting service. For those institutions who want to be more involved in the on-going development, an advisory council of sorts will be formed. And those institutions will have the chance to financially support further development, and also serve on the council. Representing the archives community during the current development phase are folks from NYU, U. Of Indiana-Urbana- Champaign and U. Cal San Diego. The programmers from Hudson-Molongio are building ArchivesSpace using JRuby, a combination of Ruby and Java.
The Roundtable discussion quickly turned to the fact that collections assessment will not be included in this first wave of development. Now a prominent part of AT, this functionality will be left for down the road.
In addition, as this product is being developed, EAD and DACSare being revised. Mark made it clear that production of ArchivesSpace will not wait for those two revisions to be completed.
Mark also shared that the workflow for migrating data from AT and Archon into ArchivesSpace- will begin in the fall.
As someone working at a repository where we’re just beginning to invest time in AT, I hope that ArhivesSpace will be released sooner rather than later. I don’t think, nor are the developers of ArchivesSpace suggesting, that institutions stop implementing AT because ArchivesSpace is on the horizon. We, as archivists and archives can’t wait for a new product, we must continue to offer users access to our content.
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