Recent Posts

As of this past July 1st, the Digital Programs team (we’re often colloquially referred to as the D-Team) is now officially known as Digital Strategies. This seemingly insignificant change of one word in our name reflects tectonic shifts, both to our team’s role as well as a larger organizational approach to technology and technical expertise.

This month, we completed our project to create an ArchivesSpace Helpers Package. While the end product looked slightly differently than initially scoped–we’re about to embark on a project to add some of the code we’ve created to the ArchivesSnake library–we created a library of functions and tests that use ArchivesSnake with common use cases. This is the second of two blog posts, where project team members reflect on the project. Here are the code owners, who were paired with code helpers on a rotating basis, and were responsible for writing the code for each sprint, as well as a reflection from me, the scrum master and product owner.

This month, we completed our project to create an ArchivesSpace Helpers Package. While the end product looked slightly differently than initially scoped–we’re about to embark on a project to add some of the code we’ve created to the ArchivesSnake library–we created a library of functions and tests that builds on ArchivesSnake to support common use cases. This is the first of two blog posts, where project team members reflect on the project. First up are the code helpers, who were paired with code owners on a rotating basis, and were responsible for understanding and presenting the work of their partner at the scrum meetings.

Earlier this year, the RAC undertook a project to research the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the European Commission’s data protection legislation that took effect in May 2018, and produce a report on its implications for the RAC. In general, there’s a dearth of information and lack of clear legal interpretation related to archival collections data and the GDPR, particularly for U.S. archives, so we’ve made that report available on the RAC’s Documentation Site so that it might be useful for other institutions. In this post, I’ll introduce some concepts from the GDPR and share a few key resources on the topic of how it applies to archives.

In preparation for our new discovery system, processing archivists at the RAC have been working on cleaning up some of our data in ArchivesSpace in order to facilitate improved searching. A large chunk of data that has been problematic for some time is our collection of agent records in ArchivesSpace. We simply had too many agents, none of which are standardized, and most which were duplicates of agents that were already in our system, misspelled, or contained incorrect data. Some of our finding aids had too many agents at the file-level, and other findings aids didn’t have any linked agents at all. The state of our agent records makes it difficult for researchers to use the “Filter by Creator” feature, since there is no consistency as to how many agents are assigned, or the level in which they are assigned to a finding aid. In this post, we’ll discuss how we evaluated and cleaned up the agents in our repository.