Q&A with Brad Westbrook, Chris Prom, Scott Schwartz and Annie Ross about the AT and Archon Integration Project

Following below is a transcript of questions forwarded to Brad Westbrook, Chris Prom, and Scott Schwartz by Cory Nimer (BYU) on behalf of the SAA Archivists’ Toolkit Roundtable Steering Committee. The questions were answered collectively by Westbrook, Prom, Schwartz, and Annie Ross. This exchange is meant to give the AT and Archon communities a better sense of the current status of AT and Archon and the future of the integrated program now being considered.

ABOUT THE NEW PRODUCT:

In February the project announced that they had been awarded a Mellon planning grant. What activities are supported by the grant?

Categorically, there are three kinds of activities supported by the Mellon grant announced in February: 1) Planning the integrated application, including drafting of functional requirements and selected specifications; 2) Initial development of a sustainability vision / method; and 3) Providing modest user support services for AT and Archon in the form of responding to user questions, resolving bug reports, and, where warranted, providing maintenance releases of each application (two have already been released for AT since January).

How will last year’s webinars inform the work the project team does during the grant?

Last year’s webinars (Dec 2009) are a very important part of the planning process. The archives team (Prom, Schwartz, and Westbrook) utilized comments given during the webinars (as well as comments delivered early in response to a first draft of the high-level requirements for the integrated application) to identify and prioritize functional requirements for the integrated application. The specification work plan is based largely on the feedback from the webinars and earlier set of responses. The webinars particularly were useful for revealing core functionalities that are keenly important to archivists. They were also helpful in identifying other functions that might be best satisfied by some other means, for example as plug-ins to the new tool, or by other software tools (e.g., for handling user registration / use tracking and for a preservation / conservation assessment).

The press release mentioned community consultation during the grant. How will you involve the community in developing the "next-generation architectural framework"? The "functional specifications"?

The request for comments to the first draft of the high-level requirements and the webinars were two distinct points where we successfully consulted with the prospective user community for the integrated application.

The community also will be consulted during the planning grant, possibly when all the specifications are completed. At this time, we also hope to include significant community consultation during the programming phase of the application, and will provide more information when the next phase of the project is being developed and submitted.

That said, we are looking for other ways that the community is willing to assist in what is becoming a large undertaking. Certainly one way is substantially assisting project members with documenting and communicating the agreements and progress of the project.

How and when do you foresee engaging the community in envisioning the sustainable governance and business model that is to be developed during this planning grant?

This is a complex question that cannot be simply answered by the archives team. Currently the project’s administrative team is leading the sustainability discussion, and we expect they will provide more details to the community as discussion comes to resolution. However, members of the AT and Archon community should feel free to contact the project director, Susan Harum, if they have suggestions to offer the project team, as well as the community as a whole.

Over the past couple of years the Archivist's Toolkit project team has encouraged the development of the Archivist's Toolkit Roundtable (ATRT) within the Society of American Archivists. What do you see as their role during this planning process and the eventual development of the new application if the Mellon Foundation provides additional funding for its development?

There are a great number of opportunities available for the Roundtable to be involved in this integration project. The Roundtable might start by re-envisioning its mission. Granted the ATRT has had only one meeting but given the trajectory of the AT/Archon integration, there may be great benefit in deciding whether and how to enlarge the ATRT mission now to include Archon users and their concerns.

During the planning phase, the ATRT can, and will, play a role in helping to determine the content of the ArchivesSpace website, and, moreover, will help in providing a substantial amount of that content. During the build stage, the Roundtable could help prepare user documentation, assist users, test pre-release versions of the application, and usability testing, to name a few key areas where assistance would be beneficial. Assistance entails not only being a tester or technical writer, but also managing these activities and leveraging the resources of the broad archives community.

In her recent article in Code4Lib, Sibyl Schaefer recommended that the project review existing plug-ins for inclusion in the functional specifications for the joint product. How will the functional areas or specific needs that these plug-ins represent be addressed in the planning process?

Frankly, that remains to be seen. As noted at last year’s SAA meeting, we are committed to migrating as much AT and Archon legacy data and plugin functionality as possible, and it was noted that deployment of the Java Plugin Framework in the AT should help to facilitate migration of plugin functionality, but not necessarily in their look and feel. How well we are able to migrate the plugins will be determined by the technical architecture selected, the amount of resources available for the first phase of development, and the priority assigned to certain functional areas including plugins. One point of agreement of the webinars was that the assessment functional areas in both the AT and Archon (albeit quite different in scope) would be best addressed as an external application not only available to the ArchivesSpace tool but to other collection management tools present in a typical, multi-faceted repository.

In addition, the specification work done already for the integrated application has made use of the specifications for date and extent statements fashioned by Brigham Young University. So we expect those plugins’ functionality to be accounted for in the integrated application. Yale’s plugin functionality remains an outstanding question for the moment.

How will the ArchivesSpace website be used by the project, and what sort of information will be provided during the planning and development process?

We are very early in the planning stage and, given our scant resources, most of our attention has been focused on drafting specifications, constituting a technical team for choosing a technical architecture, and initiating the governance theme. In coming months, we e expect we will have more discussions about what content will go on the ArchivesSpace website and about who might take responsibility for certain portions of it.

In a recent posting to the Archivist's Toolkit User Group listserv, Peter Van Garderen of the ICA-AtoM Project advocated the need to work together to develop a common application architecture. To what extent will the joint project and the ICA-AtoM team work together in systems planning and development?

Peter is included in our conversations, and we have much to learn from his experience with ICA-AtoM. We are also interested in pursuing a similar line of inquiry with CollectionSpace, a tool designed for the museum community, and OLE, a tool being designed for the bibliographic community. There are many, many perceivable synergies among these projects. A goal in the next several months will be to foreground areas where these projects can collaborate without replicating current efforts and build on experiences and lessons learned from each project.

Peter also brought up the issue of licensing in his response. Both the Archivist's Toolkit and Archon were released under research and academic licenses instead of the General Public License (GPL), which it appears led to some apprehension and/or prevented some groups from participating in development. Under what license does the project plan to release its code and documentation?

The choice of open source licenses for the Archivists’ Toolkit and Archon were deliberate and were based on the collective wisdom of the three institutions and their legal experts. (In the case of Archon, the application was initially released under an ECL but later moved to the less restrictive Illinois Open Source license.) The AT and Archon teams are not aware of contributions impeded by the license of either application.

Regarding the ArchivesSpace project, the particular license has not been decided, or even discussed. The choice will most likely be made fairly early in the project as it will influence how the application is built (e.g., what existing code can be leveraged) and, to a certain degree, the business model for the application. Certainly, the intent is to choose an open source license that will best facilitate the long-term sustainability of the application. And, of course, one factor in that objective is developing a community of code contributors.

Whether to issue under GPL or another, less restrictive open source license will be considered very carefully and in congruence with the business model for the application.

SUPPORT OF THE EXISTING PRODUCTS:

Until the completion of the merged product, what level of maintenance will the project provide for Archivist's Toolkit? Do you foresee additional update releases beyond the current update?

As implied above, certain resources are being allocated to responding to questions of current users, resolving reported bugs, and issuing maintenance releases when necessary. The “when necessary” is situational and depends on the severity of a problem: how serious is the problem and how broadly is the user community affected. At this time there are no plans for new releases of either tool beyond what was outlined in the original integration project plan and has been stated in Archon’s interim MATC Report.

The February press release mentioned that UC San Diego will be responsible for providing support for both the Archivist's Toolkit and Archon during this planning stage. How will the maintenance of Archon affect support for the Archivist's Toolkit?

One person, based at UCSD, is responsible for managing user questions for AT and Archon and answering those questions and/or forwarding questions to the appropriate person(s) on the Archon or AT team, each team of which includes an archivist and programmer. In short, we do not see this as under cutting service to either AT or Archon users.

That said, we think the Archivists’ Toolkit Round Table may wish to consider evolving itself in accord with the integration project, to enlarge its mission to include both AT and Archon users, and help foster further discussions that address the migration of both of these communities’ data to the next generation tool.