Recent Posts

Since the RAC was founded in 1974, we’ve collected information about our researchers, including contact details, visit dates, topics of research, and publications. Starting in the 1980s, we captured this information in a number of different databases. Currently, this data is stored in ATReference, a customized version of the Archivists’ Toolkit that was developed by the RAC. As part of both the Aeon and ArchivesSpace implementation processes, we needed to migrate that data forward into Aeon so we can continue to access and add to the wealth of information it contains without having to support ATReference.

About a year and a half ago, we decided that we were going to make the switch from our current Archival Management System, the no-longer-updated Archivists Toolkit, to its next iteration, ArchivesSpace. The RAC officially began preparing ourselves for ArchivesSpace in January of 2014.

It’s been a while since we posted anything about our Aeon implementation, so I wanted to share some of what we’ve been working on, as well as what you can expect in the coming months.

I’m just back from edUI, a conference of web professionals who work in educational institutions, held in Richmond, Virginia. As was the case last year, it was a gathering full of fascinating presentations given by excellent speakers. I was very honored (and more than a little intimidated) to present on some of the work we’ve done to improve DIMES. There was a lot of interest in what archivists do, and in bringing the worlds of user experience and archives in closer conversation, which I find very exciting.

You might remember that earlier this year I wrote a post about Metadata Cleanup and Ford Foundation Grants that gave a very basic overview of how I went about reconciling thousands of subject terms against the Library of Congress. This reconciliation was essential in helping us gain control over data that we did not create, but that we also identified as possibly extremely valuable to researchers. This post will give an in-depth and updated account of how I hobbled together a (mostly) automatic way to check large amounts of topical terms against the Library of Congress. It still requires some hands-on work and quality checking is a must, but it cut a hundreds of hours job down exponentially.