2014-10-29 Meeting notes ADWG

• Dumbarton Oaks

  • Repository:

  • small

  • light weight IT

  • Started looking in 2012

  • started by coming up with functional requirements: both archival and item-level description

  • Impressed with responsive support

  • AT too focused on archival desc.

  • wanted to be able to export

  • interoperable w/ other catalogs

  • Ingest variety of formats: excel, metadata in various formats, access

  • flexible, hierarchical structures

  • started looking at around 24, quickly down to 8

  • wanted something to could handle variety of material types

  • wanted a larger user group- collective access had few people using the user forums

  • Migration

  • need to be able to further develop taxonomy functionalities before using AtoM

  • platform agnostic- windows or mac but ran into problems- hung up for about a month

  • AtoM wound up re-writing documentation to better support

  • Had little IT support

  • contracted with outside IT consultant

  • hosted through Amazon cloud-works well

  • Doing some in-house development (plugin) through Artefactual

  • Started with contracted developer in house

  • documentation is still sometimes misleading, over simplified

  • have run into number of bugs

  • timeline has been long

  • Wound up using Artefactual for development rather than contracted developer

  • Legacy systems- not all have been migrated (image catalog system is next for migration)

  • developing mapping system between AtoM and legacy system

  • 70000 images in legacy image catalog system

  • Have entered som finding aids as data entry (not imported)

  • End users confused because some data had been entered into AtoM some hadn’t

  • created stub records for everything in AtoM just so everything would be represented

  • All data entry (38 collections)

  • In-house customization vs. sponsorship

  • minimal customization

  • confusion about menu labels out of the box in AtoM

  • Get an overview of collections in a system- page of collections

  • Renamed first value in browse menu to “collections” to make it clearer

  • Incorporated user-friendly language in menus

  • developed some additional help documentation

  • Have begun two development projects

  • in-house plug-in (not sponsored)

  • Sponsored content: enhancement to places taxonomy-

  • already allowed BT, NT, Use, Use For etc., worked well on admin side

  • hierarchical data didn’t make it to catalog record and wasn’t being indexed. Users didn’t benefit from hierarchical structure created on admin side

  • sponsored cataloging, browsing, indexing functionality

  • wanted related material that would actually link to those related materials, not just free text

  • EAD3

  • Haven’t spoken to Artefactual yet.

  • Wish list based on user study

  • No way to search by date, would be nice

  • Addition of preferred citation

  • now using notes field

  • Added accent-insensitive search

  • Shopping cart

  • tool-tips made visible to end-users as explanatory text?

  • Timelines

  • explosion in US use since 2009

  • a lot of development

  • have been very responsive on a vareity of platforms

  • but for contracting development look at 3-4 months out

  • fairly large backlog of projects-also working on new versions of AtoM

  • Internal Validator/EAD exporting

  • Also would be interested in a tool for validating/previewing

  • currently export, run xslt on record, then convert into MARC which can be uploaded to OCLC

  • would love to simplify process

  • Kickstarter-eque effort to fund such a tool?

  • Would like to see tree view added to AtoM (like what world bank had customized)

  • was this not added to general AtoM codebase? Why not?

Jazz Heritage

• Repository:

• Small

• lots of digital materials- streaming music and digital photos

• used Access for inventories but wanted something  to deal with digital preservation

• Evaluation of Archivists Toolkit

• seemed too focused on archives, rather than digital objects

• needed something to deal with eclectic collections of variety of media plus records management functionality

• Migration

• converted data to csv to migrate out of access

• no internal IT- outsources some technical support

• IT guy got onto AtoM forums

• Smooth migration

• Delays happen due to out-sourced IT

• In-house customization vs. sponsorship

• Haven’t looked into customization much- works well as-is

• Still pretty fresh out of the box

• focused just on getting data into system

World Bank

• About to launch

• have had some customization done

• Lots of deep finding aids

• Navigational structure on left wasn’t working- Artefactual built up an expanded tree view - shows where you are in hierarchy

• Will not manage FA’s in tool itself (using TRIM (sp?)) which is a collection management tool, but has no public interface

• converted data into csv, custom artefactual script will then move into AtoM

• Will export all changed data 1/month or so from one system to the other

• will have some static pages w/in AtoM

• some security issues have come up

• vulnerable to malicious code

• working with Artefactual to fix those issues

• Not uploading digital materials to AtoM- has a separate system that uses pdfs

• will link out to other system from AtoM

• Customized some reports in-house using php to allow users to download pdfs from pages

• launch in early Feb.

• security ironed-out

• push-pull between the two systems worked out

• Not enough development staff at Artefactual causes delays- afraid that in-house delays at World Bank will cause repository to lose place in line for Artefactual development projects

• Platform is large, developed over time- new Artefactual staff has to ramp up