Recent Posts

I’ve just returned from the Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting, held this year in Cleveland. As usual, it was a rewarding experience, full of opportunities to connect and catch up with colleagues from all over the country, as well as to learn from the speakers in a variety of sessions.

In preparation for upcoming changes to the display of digital objects in DIMES, I’ve been pursuing some enhancements to data export from ArchivesSpace. This began with a plugin to improve METS exports, including embedded MODS records, but then grew into a more comprehensive project to automate the export of updated resource records, version that data, and then push it to DIMES.

Over the last few years, we’ve been creating and acquiring digital assets (more on what I mean by that term in a second) at a pretty astonishing rate, and we’ve thus far lacked a way of managing them. They’re stored in a variety of places (some more discoverable than others) and it’s difficult to know exactly what we have. In fact, when I tried to figure out the extent of these assets when writing this post, I couldn’t do it. I just ended up feeling like Clark Gable:

A while ago I wrote a post detailing how data in DIMES is imported into Aeon to populate requests. Since then, I’ve had conversations with several individuals asking about the technical details of this implementation. As a way of documenting that work, and also offering some direction for future Aeon implementers, I thought I’d pull together a post describing the interaction in technical terms, since there’s limited documentation on how to do external EAD requesting for Aeon. I pieced together this information by looking at existing implementations, particularly Princeton’s archival discovery system, with a lot of false steps along the way. I hope to help others avoid the same frustrations and pitfalls!

Last week, we made some changes to DIMES that will allow for better sharing on social media sites, particularly Facebook and Twitter, by adding embedded metadata.