Recent Posts

It’s been a busy couple of weeks for conferences! On Friday, Bonnie and I attended a Born-Digital Workflows CURATEcamp, held at the Brooklyn Historical Society. We gave a brief presentation on our workflows for arranging and descriping born-digital materials, and also learned a lot from other attendees.

On Friday, April 17, we attended Mistakes Were Made: Computer History, Decompiled. Sponsored by NYU’s Department of Media, Culture and Communication, the program was organized around a series of conversations which paired “emerging scholars” with practitioners in the field.

Over the weekend, we launched an improved version of DIMES functionality that allows users to search within a single finding aid. Previously, the “Search this collection” simply added highlighting to hits within the body of the finding aid, which meant it was often impossible to find hits in long contents lists. In fact, we noticed that many users were simply resorting to using their browser’s “Find” functionality.

CUSTOMIZING THE APPLICATION – 22 hours in 4 months

While we were mostly happy with the base ArchivesSpace application, we did want to make a few changes to the display and functionality in order to make it more user-friendly. I started out by referencing the Customizing and Theming ArchivesSpace documentation as well as the developer screencasts.

Migration Testing, Data Quality Checks, and Troubleshooting Errors – 295 hours in 8 months

After finishing the initial data cleanup, it was time to start testing our migration; the only way to identify major issues was to do a dry run. To set up for our initial testing, I took a MySQL dump of our AT database, loaded it up into an empty AT instance, and then installed the AT Migration Plugin. To install the AT Migration Plugin, just place the scriptAT.zip in your base AT plugins folder, either on a server or on your local machine.

Our first migration test did not go smoothly.