Monthly Archives: June 2015

ArchivesSpace at the University of Edinburgh – the techie side

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Introducing ArchivesSpace for researchers and public users, as well as the administrative side for our Archives Team within the Centre for Research Collections, has been an ongoing project for the last 18 months. It has taken us a while to get the service live for a number of reasons and we have learnt lots along the way.

ArchivesSpace is free open source software and is easy to set-up using Jetty and MySQL, however some of our requirements have meant getting to grips with the underlying set-up and APIs of the system. We have also joined ArchivesSpace as paid members as this enables us to get additional support through documentation and mailing lists.

Import of authority controls
We had an existing MySQL database containing thousands of authority terms collected by the Archives Team. It was very important for us to keep these and import them into our ArchivesSpace instance. We imported the subjects using the ArchivesSpace API. Learning how to use the API was made easier by the Hudson Molonglo Youtube videos. We have written simple PHP scripts to allow us to connect to the ArchivesSpace backend and import the subjects and agents from MySQL database exports of our existing authority terms. After some trial and error we have imported 9275 subjects and 13703 agents into ArchivesSpace.

For a while the authorities were not linking with the  resources migrated into ArchivesSpace by the Archives Team,  via the EAD importer. To enable the authorities to link we had to make modifications to the EAD importer in the plugins. The changes are available to view on our Github code repository. We also made changes to the importer to allow us to get a greater understanding of why EAD imports were failing. The reasons why EAD failed to import have changed as new versions of ArchivesSpace were released and the EAD importer is quite strict. The Archives Team migrated 16836 resources (including components) for launch on 9th June.

API for other things
We have also used the API to run through all resources imported from EAD and publish them. By default they were not all published and a lot of the notes and details of the resources were hidden from the public interface. Therefore being able to script the publishing was a great time saver.

Tomcat set-up
We decided to run ArchivesSpace under Tomcat as it is a web server that we have a lot of experience with. However, ArchivesSpace runs easily under Jetty and running it under Tomcat has caused us some headaches, due to URLs issues and the fact that the Tomcat installation script adds a lot of files to Tomcat and not just the web apps.

Customisation
We have customised the user interface for the administrative and public front ends of ArchivesSpace. These changes were made within the local plugin. The look and feel has been made to fit in with our other services such as collections.ed and the colour scheme of the University. This was relatively straightforward as ArchivesSpace UI is based on Twitter Bootstrap. Unfortunately the public UI images were displaying when running in Jetty but not in Tomcat. After some copying of files the images appeared.

ArchivesSpace at University of EdinburghThe Public ArchivesSpace Portal http://archives.collections.ed.ac.uk

Early Adopters
It has taken longer than we had initially hoped to launch ArchivesSpace for a number of reasons. Primarily as early adopters of software there were issues that we did not foresee when the initial version was made available. The ArchivesSpace members mailing list is very active, as it is a new system there are lots of shared questions from those getting to grips with the system and working through their implementation.  ArchivesSpace, particularly Chris Fitzpatrick, have helped steer us in the right direction and shared code. The migration of EAD has been a huge task that has been undertaken by Deputy Archives Manager, Grant Buttars, it has been great to work with him and to get a greater understanding of the format of EAD when resolving issues with failing imports.

We still have lots to do with the system to leverage its full functionality and fully showcase our amazing archives collection through links to http://collections.ed.ac.uk and our image repository. So watch this space.

This post follows on from Grant’s post http://libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk/edinburghuniversityarchives/2015/06/22/implementing-archivesspace/

Claire Knowles
Library Digital Development Team

Open Repositories 2015

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Last week I was very fortunate to attend the Open Repositories Conference in Indianapolis. Where I was co-authoring a presentation on metadata games with Tiltfactor, Dartmouth College, and also co-chairing the new Developer Track and Ideas Challenge at the conference with Adam Field from EPrints Solutions, University of Southampton.

IMG_2661The conference hotel in downtown Indianapolis

It was very packed few days as the conference has moved from five to four days with more tracks running simultaneously. This unfortunately meant I didn’t get to see all the presentations I want to see, but all the papers are online and the main conference room was recorded. The keynote speakers were Kaitlin Thaney (Mozilla Science Lab) and Anurag Acharya (Google Scholar) who both gave very interesting and very different presentations. Kaitlin managed to hold the whole room’s attention despite having to talk via Skype, due to problems with flights. Their slides are available here and the videos should be online soon. Anurag’s talk was very specific on how repositories need to be designed to work with Google Scholar and has already created lots of debate over the use of PDF cover pages.

The Developer Track was new for OR15, it was designed, along with the Ideas Challenge, to stop the developers who attend the conference being torn between writing code for a competition and attending conference sessions. There were lots of demos and it was great to see no one having to apologise for screens of code, XML and terminal windows. I found the sessions really practical and have a list of things to try now I am back in the office, starting with Hardy Pottinger’s Vagrant-DSpace.

IMG_2700Hardy demoing Vagrant-DSpace

The Ideas Challenge, was designed to be less time intensive that the previously run Developer Challenge but still encourage people to discuss issues they would like to resolve, meet new people, and have a fun session where audience participation was encouraged. Adam and I created an example challenge and solution based on the Sound of Music Idea’s Challenge Slides. We had 9 entries to the challenge this year and thanks to Adam’s scoresheet there were no long deliberations and a clear winner was identified after our judges handed in their scores. Congratulations to the winners Blog post about the challenge winners.

IMG_2780Slide from the Winning Entry – Email Deposit

My presentation on Crowdsourcing Metadata Session Slides was in front of a packed room. Helped by my talk being sandwiched between Rob Sanderson from Stanford University and Simeon Warner from Cornell University. I got some great questions and hopefully passed on the message that engagement is just as important as developing the tools. My co-authors at Tiltfactor launched their new OCR verification games last week http://beanstalkgame.org is very addictive (you have been warned).

Screen Shot 2015-06-19 at 06.14.56Tiltfactor’s Beanstalk game

There was a lot of discussion during the Monday’s DSpace DCAT and Committer meeting and also during the DSpace Interest Group about the ambitious work planned for DSpace 7 in 2016. The University of Edinburgh manages DSpace repositories on behalf of the Scottish Digital Library Consortium and Stuart Lewis is a DSpace Steering Committee member. I hope that these plans get the support they require within the DSpace community to make them happen.

Hardy Pottinger has written a blogpost about the conference and his ’stuff to check out later’ to take away from the conference and try is similar to mine so I won’t repeat it. Although I would add Vagrant and implementations of IIIF. Both of which have been on my todo list for a while, but I really really want to find time to play with them now.

Thanks to Sukie at Tiltfactor and Adam for lots of Skype calls over the past few months, and to the Open Repositories organisers for a great week.