2014-08-07 Meeting Notes

Thoughts about last week's AtoM demo

• Architecture

  • Excited rather than concerned

  • What customizations would be necessary - how much would it be, how would costs break down

  • They currently have accession FileMaker Pro database and the drawings database (project-based so its number of drawings, project name, collaborators, where they are located

  • Architecture does have a backlog but we’re not sure what that looks like

  • Architecture’s workflow starts in Excel for Katie or straight in Oxygen

• Tarlton

•  

  •  Currently they have a manual workflow - word documents, excel spreadsheets and pdf

  • Whatever the university would adopt, they would be interested in adopting  

  • No established best practice workflow which presents a great opportunity to select a new tool and work towards that shift; Thinking about using a new tool would be a chance to reevaluate the the values they are creating for various ead elements

  • They currently have a spreadsheet for accessions, no database

  • Evelina pointed out that in our AtoM sandbox, records currently display by accession number only and not the collection name; she is interested in searching the accession records by keyword and not only the accession number

• Deal breakers

  •  ease of EAD editing, validation & export to TARO

  • need to get around all the intense nesting in AtoM

ArchivesSpace

• Danielle Plumer negotiated for an educational license for the iSchool, perhaps we could investigate possibilities for a second demo with documentation

Bringing in the iSchool

• Possibly working with Ciaran, Pat and the SAA Student Chapter for help on developing strategies

• Also giving students the opportunity to be present for some of the "behind-the-scenes" of archival description on campus

FileMaker

• They are all over the archival profession

• They are aging at various rates

• They store some of our most important institutional data (accession records, patron records, descriptive metadata, relationships between items between and across collections, etc.)

• Ladd "munched" word doc files into FileMaker Pro database for Architecture back in the day

• Possible SAA 2015 proposal about FMP its associated data management/digital preservation challenges

TARO Steering Committee Update

• Amy mentioned five-ish TARO working groups

• Possibility of connecting with standards committee for TARO to coordinate archival description working group efforts with theirs

UTexas Archival Description Working Group

• this group will provide a space where all of the archivists on campus can collaborate on tools for mapping current workflows/auditing our current systems, FileMaker Pro migrations, comparing standards for description, data normalization, developing functional requirements, system evaluation, and more. 

• Our first meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, August 20th from 3-4pm. Tentatively, we have agreed to meet every two weeks until we have a list of concrete tasks and we can self-assign. We will report back to the digipres group if there is interest within the digi-pres group.

• We discussed whether it was appropriate to use the digipres list for communication, and because it falls outside of digital preservation, we will ask the members of the list if they are interested in updates anyway or if we should create a listserv just for archival description.

• The group will be in regular contact with the TARO Standards Sub-Committee, Chaired by Rebecca Romanchuk so that the work we do can contribute to that broader effort

• The group also wants to work with the archives program at the iSchool - Danielle Plumer negotiated an education license for ArchivesSpace so we may be able to compare ArchiveSpace to Atom using some of the evaluation tools that Esther and Paloma developed