This month, we are pleased to announce that we have successfully transferred, validated, appraised, and accessioned digital records from the Ford Foundation using the Project Electron infrastructure. We plan to onboard more donor organizations over the next year. With Aurora and the associated Project Electron systems now receiving digital records, we’ve reached a major milestone for this project and for the Rockefeller Archive Center as we expand our capabilities as an archival repository and research center.
From our initial launch of Aurora in 2018, we’ve continued to make improvements to the pieces of the Project Electron infrastructure that facilitate the transfer of digital archival records. The infrastructure, including Aurora, the microservices, the API Gateway, and Fedora, are now all deployed in the Amazon Web Services platform. Based on the results of testing with the Ford Foundation and archivists at the RAC, we have:
- Added user documentation for Aurora to the RAC’s documentation site.
- Released several versions of Aurora, the latest of which includes updates to the user interface as well as a number of bug fixes.
- Improved the user interface of Zodiac, the API Gateway, to better track errors and help users understand how data moves between the microservices.
As our donor organizations prepare to transfer records, we are also exploring tools that can help them bag groups of records according to the RAC Bag-It Specification, including the APTrust’s DART (Digital Archivist’s Resource Tool.
What’s Next
We will continue to work with our donor organizations to enable the use of Aurora to receive their digital records, and we will continue to improve the application based on the experiences of our user communities. In other Project Electron development news, we have now moved to the next phase, which is to create a system for the discovery and delivery of archival records for researcher access. As always, we will continue to share our progress, and we always appreciate feedback from the community!