Recent Posts

As we wrap up the transfer phase of Project Electron, we’re turning to the next phase of the project which focuses on building, updating, and implementing systems, tools, and processes to facilitate access to digital records. We’ve started this work - which we’re calling the discovery and delivery phase - by revisiting and evaluating the user stories and personas produced during our user research in 2016 and 2017. Although this research was foundational to our understanding of the scope of Project Electron and shaped many of its deliverables, it was completed over two years ago. We needed to make sure our original user stories and personas still reflected our users and their needs.

In this post I’ll explain how we’ve revisited these original design artifacts to ensure that they continue to represent our thinking as an organization, and how this revision supports our project value of “plac[ing] users at the center of the design process.”

At the RAC, training and professional development have long been priorities and supported by substantial institutional resources. As technology has become an ever-critical part of our work at the RAC, the Digital Programs Team has been increasingly involved in training colleagues on using archival technology, usually as part of other projects, including running a cross-team reading group on digital preservation, ArchivesSpace training, and FTK training. However, despite all of these training efforts, the D-Team hasn’t had a unified strategy or articulated values for technology-related training. After reflecting on past training and thinking about what we wanted to do in the future, we realized we needed to approach this area more strategically and holistically in order to ensure that our colleagues have access to training opportunities that match their learning styles, and that training and education opportunities spearheaded by the D-Team align with our values as well as the RAC’s mission. A good first step towards that end seemed to be articulating principles for education and training.

In the four years since we migrated to ArchivesSpace, the RAC has found many uses for the ArchivesSpace API. It has helped to transform our work in countless ways and aided us in enabling organizational change and fostered greater comfort with technology. However, with every tool that we worked on and every script that we wrote, we found ourselves writing some of the same portions of our code over and over again. It became clear to us that we needed a simplified way to do the routine and repetitive API work.

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.