1.
~ a new tool for archives
management~
~a new tool for archives management~
S COT T RENTON, L IBRARY DIGI TAL
DEVELOPMENT
UNIVERS I TY OF EDINBURGH
JULY 201 4

2.
Archives at Edinburgh
 Part of Centre for Research Collections
 Categorised under Special Collections & Archives
 Wide and Varied Selection of Archives
 Laing Archive
 ECA Archive
 Carmichael Watson Archive
 Roslin Archive
 Godfrey Thomson’s Psychology
 Lothian Health Services Archive

3.
Edinburgh College of Art Archive
 Includes Sean Connery’s life modelling contract
 Don’t believe it?
EU3153 A.Fairweather, Sean Connery as a Life Model, 1952

4.
Current Management
 Standard ISAD(G), Schema EAD (XML)
 Laid down by GASHE and NAHSTE projects
 CMSyst: in-house built MySQL/PHP application
 Data feeds Archives Hub, ARCHON, CW site (EDINA)

5.
Which System?

6.
Archivists’ Toolkit
 Predecessor to ArchivesSpace, and trialled
extensively
 Structured to work with EAD, ISAD(G) standards
 MySQL database
 Good authorities control
 No front end!

7.
ArchivesSpace
 All archivist functionality in one place
 Web delivered
 Open Source
 Lyrasis network

8.
Infrastructure
 MySQL database
 Runs under Web Server (often Jetty, but we use
Tomcat)
 Code developed in JRuby, available Open Source
through github
 Four webapps:
 Public front end
 Admin area
 Backend (communicator)
 SOLR

9.
Migration
 Data all available from CMSyst
 Exported in EAD
 Some obstacles getting EAD to map correctly to
loaded authorities using application
 Some obstacles getting Authorities to map to
ArchivesSpace table structure in JSON load

10.
Digital Objects
 ArchivesSpace has functionality to link out to
illustrative digital objects- LUNA system
 CSV Import of data

11.
Uptake
 Popular in America
 We are the first European institution to take it
 Charter Members (54) executive
 General Members (100+) can contribute
 Include Auckland and Hong Kong now

12.
collections.ed
 ArchivesSpace will effectively be the expression of
archives within
 Need to brand seamlessly through CSS
 Need to surface Archives as CLDs
 1000s of collections

13.
Collaborative Project
 Good training delivered to Archivists
 Curators, archivists, projects and innovations staff
and digital developers all involved
 User manual collaboratively composed
 Good collaboration with other institutions-
ArchivesSpace list is lively…
 Interns

14.
Next Steps
 Conferences in Madrid and Newcastle
 Sister application for museums- CollectionSpace

15.
Further Info
 Coming soon: http://collections.ed.ac.uk/archives
 Our collections portal: http://collections.ed.ac.uk
 ArchivesSpace site: http://www.archivesspace.org/
 ArchivesSpace code: https://github.com/hudmol/archivesspace
 Gateway to Scottish Higher Education: http://www.gashe.ac.uk/
 Navigational Aids for the History of Science, Technology and the Environment: http://www.nahste.ac.uk/
 Carmichael Watson website: http://www.carmichaelwatson.lib.ed.ac.uk
 Towards Dolly website: http://www.archives.lib.ed.ac.uk/towardsdolly/
 LHSA website: http://www.lhsa.lib.ed.ac.uk
 ARCHON: http://apps.nationalarchives.gov.uk/archon/
 Archives Hub: http://archiveshub.ac.uk/
 Images Online at University of Edinburgh: http://images.is.ed.ac.uk
 Our contact: lddt@mlist.is.ed.ac.uk