Convo with Yale, part 2

I sent a few more specific questions to Mary Caldera from Yale, who sent me back a quick and thorough response, though unfortunately it may not have answered all of our questions.

Here is what she had to say about Yale's experience with starting to use ArchivesSpace:

Jessi: My Archival Description Working Group and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin and I are still at it…we've mostly decided to go the way of ArchivesSpace, and are now beginning our research into and development of a proposal to offer to UT Libraries (or General Administration) as to how much this would all cost and who we want to pay for it.  So this email does ask a few specific questions about costs…if you don't feel comfortable answering these questions, I completely understand, but we were hoping to get some inside information from current users, as it will help us make more of an estimate without going through formal purchase requests prematurely.

Jessi: As charter members, does that mean that Yale pays the "premier" membership fees?  Would that include access to all documentation and customization?  

Mary: I am not sure what you mean by premier. We joined as charter members (an option that is no longer available), we currently pay the “Very large” institution membership fee of $7500. the benefits of Charter membership are outlined on the AS website athttp://archivesspace.org/sites/default/files/AS_CharterMemberFlyer_final.pdf. It does not include customization.

Jessi: You mentioned that you were contracting with Hudson Molongo to further develop the tool to suit your needs.  

Mary: Our development is focused on two areas, enhancing the Accession module (which included improving the staff advanced search, and enhancing the container management functionality. Both are described in our blog (see especially contributions by Maureen Callahan and Mike Rush) and the documentation available in our committee page. It is worth noting that we do not plan to utilize the public interface at this time, and are considering a partnership with AS to develop it further. 

Jessi:Will those changes appear in the next iteration of ArchivesSpace, or do you pay separately for Yale-only features?  

Mary: We are committed to contributing to AS. All our development work is available to AS and the AS community. Its integration into the core code, however, is up to AS. They have already integrated the code related to the accession module into the core code. The container management development is not yet completed. Once completed it too will be available to AS for review and consideration for addition to the core code.

Jessi: We have a major backload of Word documents for our finding aids, so we're trying to pin down some numbers for hours, costs, etc., that migration would take.  We were thinking we could outsource the migration of the finding aids into EAD, and then migrate that EAD into ArchivesSpace, but we're all sort of at a loss as to how much specifically the whole venture would cost.  

Mary: At this point our migration is focused on migrating three of our four AT instances data into one AS instance. Some of our repositories have non-AT data that they want to get into the AT, including non-ead finding aids. This currently out of scope for the our committee and the costs have not been determined.

Jessi: I know that Yale was using Archivist's Toolkit before, so I imagine your migration was a lot easier than ours might be.  However, if you're comfortable (and you know), we would love to get some estimates of how many hours your migration took and/or how many hours have been spent implementing and customizing ArchivesSpace, how much cost per hour you think that was (staff time, outsourcing, whatever other methods came into play), and how much you think you all pay as an institution for ArchivesSpace overall, including hosting, maintenance, training of employees, etc. etc.?  I know it's a lot to ask but this information could be a huge step in our proposal development. 

Mary: I am sorry I cannot answer this. The dollar costs we have incurred thus far are membership fees and development costs (note there is no cost for the application itself), neither of which is necessarily required by others. At least one of our repositories may incur additional costs to outsource some customized AT data migration. I can say that there has been significant staff time devoted to development, testing, policy development, training, pre-migration data remediation, migration testing, migration and implementation none of which is completed.  Much of this may not be required by other institutions. For example, some of the most time intensive tasks, such as policy development and system development are complicated by the fact that we are implementing one AS instance for several repositories and working toward share practices at the same time. Additionally, some of the repositories are not currently using an archival management system.