Recent Posts

Over the last few months, Patrick Galligan of the digital strategies team along with Amy Berish, Darren Young, and myself of the processing team have worked on a collaborative project to export JSON representations of bibliographic data and delete all corresponding resource, subject, agent, and top container records in ArchivesSpace. This was just the first step of a larger project to create a new interim discovery system for library data separate from our archival discovery system, DIMES.

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.