Recent Posts

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.

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.