Recent Posts Page 47

Over the weekend, we finished up a year-long project to import description for almost every single grant record the Ford Foundation ever gave. This is the same project that I wrote a post about last October. To refresh your memory, we started with 54,644 grant files described in an Excel spreadsheet, and we wanted to transform much of that data into EAD, and then import it into ArchivesSpace. Normally this project wouldn’t require an entire year, but we realized over the course of the project that we did not have efficient ways to reconcile our structured data against Library of Congress vocabularies. The post in October laid out our methods for reconciling subjects against LoC data; this post will detail the methods we took to reconcile corporate names against the LCNAF.

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.