Arizona State University

I spoke with Elizabeth Dunham, Assistant Archivist for Arizona State University and Chair of the Arizona Archives Online Steering Committee.

Arizona Archives Online is built on XTF and doesn't have a content management system.  Each of their 13 members is responsible for managing their own content, and uploads their finding aids to AAO.

Arizona State University are charter members of ArchivesSpace.  Here is what Elizabeth had to say about ArchivesSpace:

So far we've had good luck with it.  The staff seemed to have an easy time learning how to use it, and so far any issues with accessing the database have had to do with internet issues (for example, having our certificate revoked due to the Heartbleed virus) rather than with AS.  Most of the staff seem to really like it, although it should be noted that they really disliked the Access databases we were using before so they may have been predisposed to like whatever replaced it.  We haven't finished updating our internal manuals to cover ArchivesSpace yet, but that should make life easier.

In my opinion, our major issues have been getting all of our data into AS and generating reports.  The issues with data were largely caused by the data itself.  Because we weren't using a content management system prior to AS, our data was not well structured.

Generating reports was a major issue for us, which we resolved by getting access to the underlying database and running SQL queries manually to extract what we needed.  It was, however, inconvenient and time-consuming.  I'm told that the latest version of AS allows custom reports, but we're still running version 1.0.9 so I can't comment on that.

We only use the staff interface for AS - the public interface is installed, but we ignore it... We also haven't tried to customize our system, primarily because our IT people are understaffed and don't have time, but also because I'm wary of customizing software.