archivesspace - scott renton, university of edinburgh

S C O T T R E N T O N , L I B R A R Y D I G I T A L

D E V E L O P M E N T

U N I V E R S I T Y O F E D I N B U R G H

J U L Y 2 0 1 4

~ a new tool for archives management~

~a new tool for archives management~

Archives at Edinburgh

Part of Centre for Research Collections

Categorised under Special Collections & Archives

Wide and Varied Selection of Archives

Laing Archive

ECA Archive

Carmichael Watson Archive

Roslin Archive

Godfrey Thomson’s Psychology

Lothian Health Services Archive

Edinburgh College of Art Archive

Includes Sean Connery’s life modelling contract

Don’t believe it?

EU3153 A.Fairweather, Sean Connery as a Life Model, 1952

Current Management

Standard ISAD(G), Schema EAD (XML)

Laid down by GASHE and NAHSTE projects

CMSyst: in-house built MySQL/PHP application

Data feeds Archives Hub, ARCHON, CW site (EDINA)

Which System?

Archivists’ Toolkit

Predecessor to ArchivesSpace, and trialledextensively

Structured to work with EAD, ISAD(G) standards

MySQL database

Good authorities control

No front end!

ArchivesSpace

All archivist functionality in one place

Web delivered

Open Source

Lyrasis network

Infrastructure

MySQL database

Runs under Web Server (often Jetty, but we use Tomcat)

Code developed in JRuby, available Open Source through github

Four webapps:

Public front end

Admin area

Backend (communicator)

SOLR

Migration

Data all available from CMSyst

Exported in EAD

Some obstacles getting EAD to map correctly to loaded authorities using application

Some obstacles getting Authorities to map to ArchivesSpace table structure in JSON load

Digital Objects

ArchivesSpace has functionality to link out to illustrative digital objects- LUNA system

CSV Import of data

Uptake

Popular in America

We are the first European institution to take it

Charter Members (54) executive

General Members (100+) can contribute

Include Auckland and Hong Kong now

collections.ed

ArchivesSpace will effectively be the expression of archives within

Need to brand seamlessly through CSS

Need to surface Archives as CLDs

1000s of collections

Collaborative Project

Good training delivered to Archivists

Curators, archivists, projects and innovations staff and digital developers all involved

User manual collaboratively composed

Good collaboration with other institutions-ArchivesSpace list is lively…

Interns

Next Steps

Conferences in Madrid and Newcastle

Sister application for museums- CollectionSpace

Further Info

Coming soon: http://collections.ed.ac.uk/archives

Our collections portal: http://collections.ed.ac.uk

ArchivesSpace site: http://www.archivesspace.org/

ArchivesSpace code: https://github.com/hudmol/archivesspace

Gateway to Scottish Higher Education: http://www.gashe.ac.uk/

Navigational Aids for the History of Science, Technology and the Environment: http://www.nahste.ac.uk/

Carmichael Watson website: http://www.carmichaelwatson.lib.ed.ac.uk

Towards Dolly website: http://www.archives.lib.ed.ac.uk/towardsdolly/

LHSA website: http://www.lhsa.lib.ed.ac.uk

ARCHON: http://apps.nationalarchives.gov.uk/archon/

Archives Hub: http://archiveshub.ac.uk/

Images Online at University of Edinburgh: http://images.is.ed.ac.uk

Our contact: lddt@mlist.is.ed.ac.uk