2016-02-18 Meeting notes ADWG

Date

18 Feb 2016

Attendees

• Paloma Graciani Picardo

• Esther E Kirchner

• Daniela O Lozano
• Mielke, Stephen C
• Amy Armstrong
• Carla Alvarez
• @Tim (GRA at Architecture Library)
• Beth Dodd
• Stephanie Malmros
• Jennifer R Hecker

Agenda

• Welcome - Introductions
• Housekeeping
• February Presentation: Alexis Antracoli, Archivist, Mudd Library, Princeton University (see notes from her interview with WebTex below)
  • Jot down your questions for Alexis regarding the Princeton Finding Aid project: http://findingaids.princeton.edu/
• ACMS Update[name]
• Round Robin Reports

• Alexis's interview with TARO's WebTex subcommittee:
  

  • Please describe all the different tools and technologies that make up your current descriptive environment? Why were these particular tools chosen? What other options did the Princeton team evaluate?

  • What was your process of evaluation?

  • Please describe the adoption/migration to your current archival collection management system? Did you encounter any challenges in the adoption/ migration process? Can you discuss your data clean-up workflows?

  • How the site works/technologies that contribute to collection management and public access:

  • they are currently in the process of evaluating the current site to still if it still serves their needs

  • they are already looking at the next iteration of the finding aid site (follow up: what are they currently considering)

  • the site you see is a custom built site by their systems department; they evaluated existing publishing platforms and dlxs but decided no

  • they do not have an integrated collections management and front end system; the site currently just publishes the collection description

  • the backend of the site involves several technologies and steps because they do alot of extra things/enhancement to their ead to provide the functionality people se on the site (sorting by date and title or linking digitized material to the finding aid site)

  • mudd currently uses AT and they manage their accessions data there; they do not use it as a database of record for anything else that they do (no locations, no finding aids); the really only use it for accessions

  • they do share this stack of technologies with other libraries on campus but they may have a different process or workflow manuscripts division)

  • MUDD Process:

  • Everything was already in EAD

  • when a collection comes in, they try and get as much descriptive info up front with date to make the process faster

  • accession record created in AT (an authoring tool for collection level information - but may change the EAD later, not storing master EAD)

  • Export EAD from at; if a collection came with description like a box list, spreadsheet) they have an xslt that they use to take the transcript/list data to transform the list into a EAD inventory

  • Once the finding aid is created, they run it through a “normalizer script” that (does a bunch of things to clean up the data):

  • normalizes dates

  • strips label attributes and <p> elements

  • adds unique component ids (if you go to the URL for a given level of description within a finding aid, you’ll see the various components have unique ids)

  • this serves to create an id that never changes even if physical items are moved in a box - the unique id is also the basis for relating digital objects to specific components - this component id becomes p

  • They validate the record - they have a looser and a stricter schema

  • Once errors are cleaned up, they commit the master EAD to SVN version control system and SVN is used as a the database for the finding aid site - additions are updated and added nightly; this is the master record

  • They also have a test site to upload EAD and preview it before they publish the EAD

  • For the test site, they upload to an eXist database  - so it’s in there somewhere

  • Systems Team - John Ellis, Sean Stroup (decision and versions of technologies, implementation) - they would be able to tell us exactly how these different tools are talking to one another

  • they do have a princeton archival collection working group to discuss workflow standardization but

  • mudd uses less ACms functions because they get much more info when it comes in the door; they have donations

  • manuscripts division uses AT/ACMS differently because they purchase collections and create more from scratch

  • collection description is done independently among repositories on campus

  • Looking at the second round improvement:

  • ADWG subcommittees (because this group is big and each can carve out their tasks)

  • UX

  • Digital Objects/Born digital - they are a hydra partner now so this subcommittee will be considering that in the context of collection description

  • Authority control/SNAC/EAC-CPF

  • Data modeling - moving away from EAD to their own data model; looking at the article on the EU Sendari (sp?) Project, LOD

  • UI

  • ArchivesSpace task force

Discussion items

Action items