Recent Posts

We are excited to announce some new functionality in our archival discovery site, DIMES, that uses Wikidata identifiers to pull in biographic information and links to external authority records about people, organizations, and families that exist in our collections. In this post, we’ll share what this looks like in DIMES and how we are enhancing our agent data in ArchivesSpace to enable these changes.

Six years ago, DACSspace, a tool that checks an ArchivesSpace repository for DACS compliance, was created by Hillel Arnold and Amy Berish. Since then, the Processing Team has been using DACSspace on a semi-annual basis to ensure that our finding aids maintain a 100% compliance rate to DACS single-level required elements.

More recently, the Digital Strategies Team and the Processing Team collaborated on a new version of DACSspace that includes improved functionality and implements coding best practices we’ve learned throughout other coding projects. This project also marks the first time a coding project was led by someone outside of the Digital Strategies Team, read more about this shift in Hillel’s post, From Silo to Hub.

As Hillel mentioned in the most recent “What We’re Working On” post, the RAC has recently implemented a log management system called Graylog. Making better use of our log files and improving our system reliability and response time was a core goal of becoming better maintainers and operationalizing our systems work. We built logging into almost all of our locally-developed systems and had experience sifting through ArchivesSpace logs, but we weren’t actively using them as indicators of application health or issues.

When Darren last wrote about the RAC’s Culturally Competent Description Campaign, we were wrapping up the Education Phase and moving toward the Action Phase. In the last update, Darren described how the CCD Education Campaign inspired the processing team to work together to change our mission statement. In the statement, our team recognized the bias in our collections and archival description and renewed our efforts to describe materials in an inclusive and respectful way.

After revising the mission statement, we needed to convey CCD values in our processing policies, practices, and procedures. The processing team approached this challenge by creating CCD processing guidelines, and ultimately, making major revisions to our processing manual.

“Surely if you have nothing to look backward to and with pride, you have nothing to look forward to with hope.” – Barbara Craig

My time at the Rockefeller Archive Center has only emphasized my desire for preserving history. I came to the RAC with an interest in archival history and my personal goal to help build an archival center in my community of Spring Valley, New York. After reading What is Past is Prologue by Terry Cook, I realized as a community we do not have any spaces that honor our past, more accordingly the history of Blackness and people of color in our community. I remember days of block parties, outdoor sporting events, dance classes and, before my time, there was a village full of vibrancy and a sense of community. While that’s changing due to rapid gentrification, you can feel the memories of what once was, being forgotten.