Archivists’ Toolkit/Archon Roundtable 2012 Annual Meeting Minutes

Minutes keeper: Kyle Rimkus

August 8, 2012

3:15-5:15pm

Location: San Diego Hilton Bayfront

Room: Sapphire MN
3:15pm- 3:30pm

MINUTES

Attendance -- approximately about 170 people

Business Meeting - Updates

Cassie Schmitt, Chair of Roundtable
   * The Archon/AT Roundtable changed its bylaws to bring them in line with SAA's new guidelines.
   * This year's election results were the following -- 231 people voted, and the new Vice Chair is Sasha Griffin; the new web liaison is Michelle Belden.
   * Archon and the Archivists' Toolkit are both in maintenance release mode pending development of ArchivesSpace.

Bill Landis, Council Liaison
   * Council has streamlined policies for Sections and Roundtables and cleaned up potential contradictions in the definitions of each.
   * Council is encouraging component groups to work on position papers for SAA.
   * Council recently approved the Trusted Digital Repositories ISO standard, opening the door for further SAA engagement with repository audit and certification.
   * The Annual Meeting Task Force reports that hotel costs have forced SAA into a difficult position regarding potential venues, and are willing to consider other options if possible.

Merrilee Proffit, OCLC Research
   * ArchiveGrid is now freely available as a service of OCLC Research, and OCLC is seeking feedback on it.
   * Many new projects are underway, especially OCLC's work with linked open data;  for example, WorldCat records are now available as linked open data.

Brian Tingle, California Digital Library
   * The CDL has released a new version of XTF, 3.1, which comes out of the box with presentation support for AT and Archon EAD XML record display. The CDL is also looking into joint online training for AT.

Jodi Allison-Bunnell gave an update about the Northwest Digital Archives (NWDA)

Sash Griffin, Luther College
   * Luther College hosted "Archon Day" in July as a forum for users of Archon.

ArchivesSpace Presentation and Discussion

Katherine Kott
   * The ArchivesSpace team has selected Lyrasis as its organizational home;  Lyrasis is exploring options for a sustainability plan to include governance and community support.
   * The operational transition to Lyrasis is an ongoing process.
   * Software development has begun with development vendor Hudson Molonglo.
   * Development is proceeding using the Agile scrum methodology to get releases out early and often.
   * Hudson Molongo is a new firm that has brought together a small but highly qualified team with experience in libraries and archives.
   * Development of ArchivesSpace is currently funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
   * Principal partners involved directly are NYU, UIUC, and UC San Diego.
   * A key component of the ArchivesSpace mandate is to develop strong community support -- hence its home at Lyrasis and the focus on developing a sustainability model.
   * The technical group has been renamed the "stakeholder team" to help  Mark Matienzo liaise with the development team.
   * Early in the development process, the technical team is interested in ensuring that data can be migrated from Archon and AT to ArchivesSpace.

Mark Matienzo
   * Elaborating on ArchivesSpace's design principles, Mark specified that:
      * ArchivesSpace must be an open source application.
      * It ought to be compelling to current users of Archon and AT as well as to new users.
      * It must be an improvement on these previous applications.
      * It must be able to scale down and up for small and large institutions.
      * It must be flexible, efficient, easy to maintain, configurable, customizable, and easily deployable.
      * It must be extensible and interoperate easily with other systems.
      * It must have well-documented APIs.
   * Its sustainability relies on a participatory governance structure.
   * In the past year, the ArchivesSpace Google Group has completed product specifications.
   * At this point, the stakeholder team is developing user stories to prioritize the application's features.
   * They are using a web-based software tool called Pivotal Tracker for identifying user stories, which will be prioritized for developers.
   * Using two-month development cycles, the development team hopes to have an initial release ready at the end of August.
   * The development team is currently identifying blocks of work to focus on.
   * The Google Group is the best place for the user community to provide feedback.

Questions and Answers
(NOTE: The names and home institutions of people who asked and answered questions are noted when available in the summaries below).

Q (a representative of Tulane University): Will there be hosted solution options?
A (Robin Dale, Lyrasis): Lyrasis will offer non-exclusive fee-based hosting, as will the California Digital Library, for their respective user communities.  Other organizations may also step in to offer hosting.

Q: Given ArchivesSpace's organizational home at Lyrasis, will there be fees to use ArchivesSpace?
A (Robin Dale, Lyrasis): You will not have to be a Lyrasis member to use ArchivesSpace;  it will remain free and open source software.

Q: Can you provide specifics on the software development vendor chosen and their background?
A (Katherine Kott): Hudson Molonglo is a US-Australia venture.  The US person had experience with AT;  the American lead has had experience with AT deployment;  the Australia-based developers have deep library experience.

Q: How much development will focus on collections management vs web interface (access) development?
A (Mark Matienzo):  The prioritization process for development will be challenging;  the hope is that the collection management feature will exceed AT, and front end will exceed that of Archon;  the development team has a commitment to develop both.

Q (Catlin Nelson, Florida Virtual Campus): Many access systems are available; will ArchivesSpace offer hooks into other systems, while also offering a generic front end for places that have no ability to create custom user interfaces?
A (Mark Matienzo):  The development team has been thinking of that, based on feedback coming from Florida as well as the  CDL.

Q (Kyle Rimkus, UIUC): What technologies have been chosen for ArchivesSpace implementation?
A (Mark Matienzo and a representative of New York University): The application will be completely web-based;  will use the JRuby environment for its performance factor and ability to scale very well; the back end is built using the Ruby-based Sinatra framework;  the front end is decoupled from the back end using a REST-based API that works across HTTP;  decoupling the front and back end will easily allow advanced institutions to have a different front end from that offered by ArchivesSpace, if they so choose.

Q: What are the exciting next-generation features we can expect in ArchivesSpace?
A (Mark Matienzo): EAC-CPF support, flexible data model; flexibility of application to be adaptable to a variety of institutional contexts.

Q (Merrillee Proffit, OCLC) : The AT survey showed that the Collections Assessment module was lowly rated;  how will the team continue to assess new requirements?
A (Mark Matienzo): The ArchivesSpace development team needs use cases and specific concrete examples from the community of what the application needs to do;  the problem is that the Archon and AT assessment modules are incompatible;  in cases such as this, the user community ought to take ownership of developing third party plug-ins.

Q (Brad Westbrook, UCSD): Could the Roundtable have a role in developing specifications for plug-ins or developing grant proposals?
A (Mark Matienzo): Yes.

Q: Could you provide greater detail to the governance structure?
A (Robin Dale):  Lyrasis envisions overseeing three governing bodies -- an ArchivesSpace Board, a Users Council, appointed by board to bring together new ideas and bring them forward for community needs, and a Technical Advisory Board;  however, governance is not in place yet and will only be created once the software is ready to be rolled out.  In the scenario currently under consideration, institutions would contribute funds to have a seat on the ArchivesSpace Board in order to influence development priorities.

Q (Christian DuPont, Atlas/Aeon):  Is it correct to assume that there will be two phases, a development phase for coding the product;  that once that is done, governance bodies will be put into place;  and that following this, payment structures will be put into place?  How exactly will software development, Lyrasis services, and membership fees be related?
A (Robin Dale): A viable sustainability plan was required by the Mellon Foundation for funding ArchivesSpace.  ArchivesSpace software will be freely available and open source, but in order to help continue supporting its development, Lyrasis would like to be able to fund programming and technical support positions, and is envisioning fostering an open source community similar to that of DSpace.

Q: What open source license will be used?
A (Mark Matienzo): ECL 2.0 has been chosen

Q: Could you provide more information on the migration process from Archon and AT to ArchivesSpace?
A (Mark Matienzo): The team is anticipating beginning work on tools in September.

Q: With revisions of DACS and EAD forthcoming, how will they be folded in?
A (Mark Matienzo): This is unknown at the moment.  The new DACS, EAD, and ASpace release dates are all very close together, which may make this impossible.

Q: Will there be parts of AT that will not be compatible for migration?
A (Mark Matienzo): The Assessments Module will not have a direct pathway, but all other features will;  non-standard use of AT may require custom migration

Q: How can this Roundtable group be more helpful?
A (Mark Matienzo): In order for developers to have actionable work, they need a series of artifacts that describe desired functionality; the Roundtable could contribute to gathering these User Stories.

Q: Will the AT Reference Module and other plug-ins go away?
A (Mark Matienzo and Cassie Schmitt): These plug-ins are not a part of the core AT code base, so are not targeted for migration;  in addition, the Rockefeller Archive that was developing the Reference Module has had some staff turnover, so they will likely not be a position to support it.

Q (Mark Custer, Smithsonian): Will multiple dates and extents be supported?
A (Mark Matienzo): Yes, it fits in with the data model.