Recent Posts

I (relatively) recently came back from Open Repositories and have had a myriad of jumbled thoughts bouncing around in my head about aligning communities, values, software, and expectations within libraries and archives. Hopefully, this blog post will serve as an outline for the thoughts that have been percolating for a few weeks, and really, a few years before that. I’ve met a significant number of professionals that I know share these opinions as well, but I think it’s helpful to spend some time reflecting on the ideas they’ve imparted and how we, as members of a community, can better align our actions with our values, and the difficulties that work presents.

We are very pleased to announce the initial release of Aurora, an application to receive, virus check, and validate the structure and contents of digital records transfers. It provides a read-only interface for representatives of donor organizations to track transfers, so that they can follow their records as they move through the archival lifecycle. It also includes functionality for RAC staff to add or update organization accounts and users associated with them, appraise incoming transfers, and initiate the accessioning process. Aurora is built on community-driven standards and specifications, and we have released it as open source software. This is a major milestone for Project Electron, and we are excited to share it with the world. Many thanks to our partners at Marist College IT and to the Ford Foundation for their generous support of the project.

We will continue to improve Aurora as we test and integrate it with a chain of other archival management and digital preservation tools.

Read more about Project Electron on the project website.

In her most recent blog post, Hannah wrote about our approach to Project Electron’s proposed systems integration architecture. One of our goals with Project Electron is to support the flow of data about digital materials between our systems and getting valuable information to researchers in new ways. Supporting data in motion is integral to Project Electron’s success, and while Hannah and Hillel have been hammering away at creating a comprehensive overview of the microservices architecture, I’ve been working with the entire archive center to develop a draft data model for discovery and display of born digital and digitized materials. If, as we’ve been thinking, Project Electron is about creating infrastructure to support data, a data model will in turn act as a blueprint for that infrastructure. Data models are tools we can use to communicate and define how we want data to move between systems, and we think understanding how our data will move throughout our systems to our researchers is vital to the success of the entire project.

I recently attended the IA Summit 2018 in Chicago. This was my first time attending the conference, which brings together a mix of information architects and design-related professionals, and I came away with some fresh perspectives on my work here at the RAC. The summit consisted of both practical talks about specific methods and tools, as well as wider reflections on ethical considerations and trends in the field.

The underlying architecture that enables the movement of data between systems is a key aspect of Project Electron. In our project values, we talk about components as modular and generalizable, independently deployable and  flexible enough to accommodate integrations with changing systems. The project value to “support data in motion” recognizes the strength of duplicate and distributed data, and articulates Project Electron’s approach to systems as points at which humans interact with or manage that data. All of this is to say that our strategic decisions relating to choosing an approach to system architecture, particularly with regards to systems integration, is essential to the project’s success and sustainability. In this post, I’ll share some of our current thinking around the various systems integration models and our considerations in choosing an approach that will enable these integrations of archival applications.