Presenters shared their exeriences implementing ArchivesSpace. Several key issues and opportunities emerged.
The central challenge was Data clean-up- at the University of Rochester we only had plain html records and we’ve chosen to outsource conversion work to a vendir to avoid this kind of time intensive work. We have yet to upload legacy accession records, and would encounter a lot of data clean-up issues if we decide to add those records to ArchivesSpace.
The opportunities include:
Importance of being part of a community of archival users
Improved efficiency of workflows
Working across library departments to ensure a successful installation and implementation process (IT, and metadata staff).
Other comments included the importance of getting the right people on the implementation team, creating a realistc and flexible implemtnation plan, and holding informational meetings to keep local stakeholders up to date with migration and implementation progress.
I wondered about the common process shared among all presentations, which was that they seemed to choose to migrate legacy date and do that clean-up before creating new accession records and resources. At the University of Rochester, we’ve been working on these processes at the same time. We did ArchivesSpace training with Brad Westbrook and his team back in December 2014. We brought our IT staff and metatdata staff to the training along with special collections staff. That shared experience gave us a great way to jump start this large project. We’ve successfully been creating accession and resource records since the training, after agreeing on workflow and record metadata requirements. Of course, we’re still grappling with our legacy data, but our staff can see the way forward and the future of our description practice.