Recent Posts

Last week I attended the Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG) Winter 2019 meeting, held at El Colegio de México in Mexico City.

Recently, in support of the D-Team’s strategic goal to stabilize systems maintenance, I’ve been refactoring some old Python scripts I’ve written: making them clearer, more modular, and easier to maintain, without introducing new (or breaking existing) functionality. I’ve found this process incredibly satisfying - fun, even - and wanted to spend a bit of time talking about why I’ve enjoyed it so much.

In November and December of 2018, we ingested 189 Rockefeller Foundation officers’ diaries into Archivematica, making access PDFs available on DIMES. These diaries recorded the day-to-day contacts and impressions of officers of the Rockefeller Foundation who visited educational, scientific and research institutions and laboratories throughout the United States and internationally. The fact that we were able to preserve and make available so many digital objects in such a short timespan is also a testament to how far we’ve come in our Archivematica use in the past several years.

If you take a look around you might notice that our blog looks pretty different. We’ve migrated to a completely different platform, and we took the opportunity to make some changes to bring the site more in line with our current systems philosophy and modern web design. The RAC has changed a lot since Bits & Bytes first launched, and we thought that the blog should reflect those changes. This post will lay out the reasons we decided to switch things up, the process of migrating the data, some of the technical improvements under the hood, and where we go from here.

As we’ve continued to refine Aurora’s functionality, and improve the application’s usability and accessibility, we’ve also been building out microservices applications which integrate a number of systems, moving digital records and data between them. Systems integrations work is not new to us at the RAC, but the integrations we are building for Project Electron are extremely mission critical. Because of that, they need to be reliable, scalable, holistically managed, modular, visible to and owned by staff at all levels of expertise. We also want them to automate routine and repetitive tasks, while supporting the value and dignity of archival labor by keeping human judgement and principled decision-making in the loop.