As many of you know, we have moved all of our finding aid data to XTF (see an earlier post for details on XTF), which is now available online at http://collectionguides.rockarch.org/xtf/search.
First of all, a huge thank you to all of you who have provided us feedback during our internal testing period. We have received many helpful and insightful comments from a number of you about the system’s functionality and display and will be continuing to tweak the system over the coming months, so please keep the comments coming!
We have more plans for enhancements to XTF in the coming months. We’ll be creating an automated way for updated finding aids to get into XTF, so that we can reduce the amount of time between edits being made in ATReference and those changes appearing online. We’ll also be working to add library records to the system, which we hope will allow researchers and staff better access to our library collection.
We’ll also be conducting usability studies with some of our researchers to see how they are using the system, and ways they think the system could be improved. Our hope is that these comments will help to augment the comments we received from many of you, to give us a full and in-depth picture of how the system is being used.
Finally, we’ll be working looking for ways to incorporate select digital objects that have been ingested into our Archivematica system into the XTF display so that researchers can view them.
We’ll keep you posted as all these projects progress, and will no doubt be looking for your feedback as we try to improve XTF both for researchers and staff.