Recent Posts

By Amy Berish, Kanisha Greaves, and Emeline Swanson

One of the professional development opportunities at the RAC this summer was the chance to participate in NEDCC’s online Preservation 101 course. The objective of the course was to create an executive summary for a collection in our own institution. While many people took the class individually, Amy, Kanisha, and Emeline joined forces to create a robust final project and collaborate across departments: Processing, Reference, and Collections Management, respectively.

It is hard to predict when inspiration is going to hit. While a great idea can strike quickly, realizing it is a longer process; one that often requires seeking the help and guidance of others. Luckily, at the RAC, I have coworkers who are ready to listen to new ideas and willing to help me figure out how to turn inspiration into reality. Today, I am very excited to share with you a recent example of such a collaboration and the RAC’s newest application: MatchBox.

This month has been all about developing the Project Electron transfer application. The work is based on our defined specifications and the development decisions we made last month with our Marist College partners at the hackathon. We are really excited about testing transfers in the coming month.

In this post I am going to briefly discuss Gherkin, which in addition to being a delightful little cucumber, is a language that is used to define the requirements of software in order to document and test the software’s behavior as part of Behavior Driven Development (BDD). We have been using Gherkin to write Quality Assurance (QA) tests for the functions of our Project Electron transfer application. The language is human-readable, so it can enable communication between teams working in different domains across a project.

We kicked off this past month with a hackathon, hosted by our Marist College partners, to plan and start developing the part of Project Electron that enables the transfer of digital records from donor/depositor organizations to the RAC over a secure network connection. We worked with the Marist College team, including Marist students, to diagram the transfer structure and dependencies, building from the transfer specifications that we released in June and discussed in our last blog update. These specify the metadata and structural requirements for transfer and provide a bag profile to validate bags from donors. Additionally, we created wireframes and started building out the user interfaces (UIs) to view and track transfer information, view error messages, and manage user and organizational accounts.

This year’s theme for the AIC Annual Conference was Treatment 2017: Innovation in Conservation and Collection Care. Julia and I were excited to present our work that culminated in the creation of the Preservation Report. The report allows our institution to better document preservation decisions and workflows.  Although we represented an archive and its unique documentation challenges, we felt strongly that the theory and principals at play in our report would benefit the larger conservation community. It is critical that we create and use a form that is readable and useable long-term and we knew that feedback from outside our organization was key.