We have had a lot of learning to do as a bunch of technologists working in a specialised area like archives.  We’ve invested a lot of time in training our teams in how to “do” archives – from behind the scenes tours of archives that just give you so much context for everything you see on a screen, to attending professional development events.  And of course – our team themselves consist of people who not only deliver technology solutions – but also that have worked as archivists and collections managers themselves.  This means that we have developed a lot of the subject matter expertise that is absolutely necessary to delivering a good solution (I’m particularly grateful for having some wonderful people who have helped me – clients and colleagues – and my ongoing membership of the Australian Society of Archivists as well).

The Queensland State Archive holds over 67 linear kilometres of records

Open source technologies are a wonderful opportunity for archives -both in terms of costs, and in terms of transparency and accountability –  and it’s something that over 20 years we have built Gaia Resources upon.  This has included originally using open source spatial software like QGIS (which we still deliver training courses in to this day) right through to delivering archival management systems based on software like AtoM, Archivematica and ArchivesSpace.  Unfortunately we do still find ourselves busting myths around open source, and explaining how we support it with enterprise level agreements and the like, but thankfully that’s becoming more and more rare these days.

Open technologies, like open source software, can deliver really excellent outcomes for archives and other collecting institutions.  These technologies can provide transparency in many ways, and we also strive to do that in our project delivery; down to giving our clients a lot of visibility into the “under the hood” ways in which these things work.  It is challenging, but across our work with so many organisations, this has helped us to develop a strong relationship based on trust and openness that has really helped us to deliver across some challenging situations.  So you can see that this open-ness is right through our projects, from the tech stack up right to how we manage our relationships with our clients, and that’s an important thing for me personally.  While we say that we support open software and open data, it’s the “open” bit that’s the most important.

Our work with the Queensland State Archives, using open source software continues to this day

It’s fitting that this year’s Australian Society of Archivists conference is themed “opening the archive” and we’ll hopefully be presenting some of our experiences and ideas in Christchurch in October.  We are also just working on some other archive related initiatives around openness and technologies, and we’ll talk more about these in the coming months leading up to the conference.

In the meantime, if you want to know more, then feel free to drop me a line or start a conversation with us on LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram!

Piers

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This paraphrases a series of questions that we’ve been asked a few times over the past year, and this really came to light in last year’s Australian Society of Archives conference where I was involved in a few workshops around archival software, standards and just ways forward.  One of the things I wrote about back then was that I’ll do an outline for small archives, and this is part of that approach.

If you’re reading this outside of Australia, please be aware this is written with a quite parochial Australian approach – so if you like, imagine me wearing a broad-brimmed hat with corks tied around it to keep the flies off!

It’s not all about size…

Firstly, it’s pretty hard to come up with a definition that suits for “small” but here I’m thinking about just not the size of the collection (or the building you’re in), but more about the resources that you have available to you.

The size of the archive (physically, and digitally) does play a role but it’s not actually that important (at least from a technology standpoint) for what you have to do.  If you have 10,000 records or 1,000,000 records, that’s not too big a deal.  However, digital storage does have an impact – storage can be expensive when you consider it needs to also be backed up and replicated for maximum redundancy.

So, ask yourself a few questions:

• Do you have your own servers and/or archival management or digital preservation software?
• Do you have support for your archival software? and
• Do you have a role defined in the orgnanisation that has at least some time dedicated to archival management and digital preservation?

If you answered No to one or more of these things, you’re probably a small archive…

Roadmap

Before you set off in a car for a long drive – and this could well be a long drive depending on where you’re heading – then you need to check that the vehicle is ready for that trip.  You would check the tyre pressure, oil, water, fuel, appropriate sugary treats in the centre console, road trip music, and then, appropriately fuelled with caffeine, you head off.

The first step is to look at what the health of the technology is around your archive.  For smaller groups, we do this relatively quickly with a conversation and some email exchanges, just to see what you’ve done already.  Often, we just need to go around and kick the tyres, but usually we’ll ask you to show us what you’ve done through a quick call and a screen share or two.

Once we’re sure of where we’re starting from, then we define the destination, and we do that through a workshop which spells out the destination and the way to get there.  I don’t like doing these workshops remotely, so I prefer to get people together in the same room and work through these sorts of issues and see where everyone wants to go.

Some of the questions I’ve asked include:

• How busy are you?
• Have you got anything already in place?
• Have you tried anything new yet?
• Are you hoping to open up the history and stories in your archives to external parties/the public or to be an internal archive?
• Do you have much digital ‘stuff’ to add to the archive?

These questions are trying to elicit more backstory and context than what we are often provided in emails and requests for quotes and proposals.  For example, sometimes we get someone coming to say “I need software package X” but what they actually have done is heard someone mention software package X and think that it’s a silver bullet – which it won’t be.

There aren’t any silver bullets here, sorry.

We’ve done a few of these roadmapping workshops with our Collections clients (some of our projects are listed on our projects page) and while it can be challenging to find the budget to do this for smaller organisations, I still think well worth the investment.

Archival Management

Usually, it’s the Archival Management side of things that kicks off first, because you want people to know what is in the Archive as a starting point.  There’s one critical part to decide on here, before we even start looking at technology, and that’s which data standard you are going to use.  If you are in Australia, and you haven’t already, pick up this publication:

Describing Archives in Context: A Guide to Australasian Practice (Australian Society of Archivists Committee on Descriptive Standards) 

This is what I’ve been using as my guide to “how things are done” in Australia, Archives wise.  It’s something I’ve been referring to regularly in our work with Archives, and the concepts are pretty important to understand.  I’ve seen a few situations where this standard isn’t followed in implementation or has been misinterpreted, and the headaches this leads to.  If you are unclear about this standard, find an Archivist who isn’t – look to your local State Archive or the Australian Society of Archivists – and get to grips with this.

Next up – how do we implement this standard and start describing our archive?

Here’s the thing – the Australian Series System isn’t something supported natively by most of the software I’ll discuss in the next section.  And if you wonder why, it’s because this wonderful standard has been developed for a small part of the world, which is a very small part of the global Archival market.  Groups like us are working towards including it into the open source packages, but that will take time and funding, although some of the planned standards like Records in Context are more inline with the Australian Series System.

There’s a whole raft of ways to implement an Archival Management System, but I’d take on board the various options at their merits, depending on where you are at in your organisational roadmap.

• Got nothing digital at all? Try Microsoft Excel to start with. Set up a single file that is structured to meet the Australian Series System and start documenting your collection.  The pedant in me really doesn’t like this option, but it does mean you can get started on capturing what’s in the archive, learning about how the Standard should be implemented (and what data you need to start collating to be compliant), and you can do it at very little cost .
• Got some sort of database, like an Access database, or one of the Archival “systems” built on that? Perhaps you’re intending to move as you can’t find support, or your own internal developer has moved on to something else, or left. Then perhaps it’s time to move into something like AtoM, or ArchivesSpace**.  While they don’t quite meet the Australian Series System out of the box, they can approximate it if you think hard about it (like we’ve helped the State Records of Western Australia to do with AtoM).
• Got your own Archival Management System already? Then why are you here? If it’s heading to its end of life (10 years is a pretty good run for a piece of software), then perhaps it’s time for a refresh? Then AtoM or ArchivesSpace might well be the choice for you – although a few other Australian organisations are also looking at CollectiveAccess.  Anyway, there’s a few choices out there that can meet your requirements, and in our experience AtoM and ArchivesSpace are both decent Archival Management System to look at, and that could be where many of the small Archive road maps end up at (you might go through the steps above first, but end up here).

Let me wax lyrical about open source here as well, because some of you might be thinking that’s all I’m looking at.  And you’d be right, for some very good reasons.  Open source is still seen as a “bad thing” in some areas of the Archival community – have a read of our previous blog I wrote addressing some of the things we commonly hear, but here’s some reminders;

The first is budget – commercial licensing comes at a cost that is an ongoing licence for using the software and getting updates.  For the open source archiving and digital preservation software I’m thinking about, this licence cost is zero, but that’s not to say the whole thing is free – you pay organisations like us to support you, to help you implement it, to keep it up to date, and you can sponsor the development of new functionality.  Effectively, everything we do for you is under a service based engagement.

The second is that open source and Archives go together better than piping hot buttered toast and Vegemite (if you’re not Australian, insert something locally appropriate).  Open source means that the source code is available to all.  If you are thinking about “forever” then this has to be an advantage – you’re not tied to a vendor (and look at us – ten years ago we didn’t do any work in Archives at all!), and you can get in there and amend the code base as you need to.

Thirdly; as we’re often used to seeing now, you can get started right now just with your own resources (possibly).  Download the open source software and give it a red hot go.  Don’t be afraid to try the demonstration sites, and reach out to others that are using it, or groups like us that support it.  The open source community is building in Australia, and the more, the merrier!

Open source software is all around us – many of the systems you use already are based on it

Oh, and don’t forget, you also need to make sure that people can use the systems you’ve put in – even the most simplistic ones – so make sure you accommodate training for your team somewhere in here (and in the next section as well!).

Digital Preservation

This is the area that trips up a lot of the Archival professionals, which is why I tend to push it back in our approach for small archives.  It’s definitely the hardest part to deal with well.

A great starting point is Ricky Erway’s “You’ve Got to Walk Before You Can Run: First Steps for Managing Born-Digital Content Received on Physical Media”.  This is a really consumable 3 page guide to getting started with digital preservation and is well worth a read to see some simple ways forward.

In our work, we’ve found vastly different views of what digital preservation means to different people.  The reference above is one that encompasses what many people think is digital preservation, but that’s just the first step.  You still have to deal with keeping the preserved copies “preserved”, and you need to be able to provide access to these as well.

Both of these are a real challenge for any archive (big or small) and again, there’s no silver bullet.  We have been implementing Archivematica for clients, and supporting them with that, but digital preservation is complicated, and there are a range of decisions that you need to make as an Archivist before you can get started with a digital preservation tool like Archivematica – and you still need to consider the digital repository as well.

In terms of the digital repository, you need to think about how much storage you’ll be needing, where you’re going to put it (e.g. Glacier), what to put on the top to manage it (e.g. DSpace), how you are going to do proactive preservation across it, and these are all things that take time and consideration.

To try to give you a complete list of things to think about regarding digital preservation (and to do so in a consumable fashion for this blog) is well beyond the scope of what I was trying to write here, so let’s just say that this is going to be a difficult part of the roadmap we have proposed, and will require considerable work up front before you dive in.  But Ricky Erway’s document is a good starting point to get you going down this path.

Ongoing

You’ve got a roadmap defined; an Archival Management System in place and in use, and you’re down the Digital Preservation path – hooray we’re done! Right?

Nope. No silver bullets, remember?

The one aspect that a lot of technology clients forget (not just for Archives) is that you need to think about how to keep the whole thing ticking along smoothly in the future, and so a big part of the roadmap discussions we have are about how this will occur after the “implementation” phases.

Apart from looking at things like providing or leasing the servers that you are using (hosting), you also need to look at how to keep the hardware and software up to date (maintenance) and what you can do when it all goes pear shaped (support).

In terms of hosting, we’ve moved a lot of our hosted services to the cloud using systems like Amazon Web Services, which give us a scalable means of providing the underlying infrastructure at a low cost.  While this might appear to be expensive when when you start looking at large volumes of data, the true cost of running your own servers to do the same is actually far greater – think of the staff costs to manage those systems, upgrade and renewal regimes, rotating backups, and the like.  For small archives, it’s hard to beat from a price/value review.

Maintenance and Support are two things that we tend to bundle together into packages for our clients, using either Service Level Agreements (SLAs), Support Blocks or Time and Materials packages.  For most small Archives, SLAs seem to be an overkill – you get us on call, faster support times and other benefits, but at a higher cost.  In terms of small Archives, this is often a stretch too far.

So most small archives turn to the Support Block approach; pre-purchasing a 40 hour block of time that can then be used across support and maintenance.  This helps fix the budget for support for the organisation, but still retains a high degree of flexibility.  Time and Materials approaches also work for very small groups, but that does usually present challenges in terms of not having fixed budgets.

Often groups forget about the Ongoing part of technology projects (especially in the app space, but that’s for another time) and that is what often causes us not only technical issues down the line, but also is very demoralising for our team – spending so much personal time and effort on projects to see them slowly decay isn’t a great way to have job satisfaction (software engineers *are* human too).

A way forward

Our way forward for smaller archives can be summarised in the four steps:

• Roadmap – define the destination and how you will get there,
• Archival Management – start documenting what’s in the Archive,
• Digital Preservation – deal with the ‘digital tsunami’ in stages, and
• Ongoing – don’t forget to support the investment you’ve just made into the future.

The last area I’d suggest you also look at is to keep an eye on the future – keeping your digital archive plans up-to-date so you can migrate to future software versions and adopt new and improved features.  When your scope is “forever” you really do need to be thinking longer term than just the latest software packages.

Each of these steps is very complex, and probably worthy of a separate blog in itself, but for now, I hope this helps to provide something for you to grasp as a starting point.  I’d be keen to hear your feedback on this*, so please get in touch via email or start a conversation with us on our  Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn feeds.

Piers

* I’m still hoping for more people to reach out from my last call for action and help about mapping where Archives are using open source software! https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/mapping-archives-open-source/

** I added in ArchivesSpace here after I first published this post as I’ve been talking to James from Hudson Molonglo about it since then, and I think it’s actually a pretty good option.  There might be others out there too – let me know if you have something else we don’t know about!

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Why are we there?

I thought it was a good time to reflect on why we were even at an Archives conference, considering we are an environmental technology company.

When we started working in the biodiversity data management space all those years ago, helping Museums and Herbaria manage their collections was a key part of that.  They are, after all, the keepers of the names that we use in biodiversity.  While on site one day at the WA Museum, I met Meg Travers, who had been seconded from the State Records Office of WA (SROWA) to help with some project work.  Meg was then the Digital Archivist of the SROWA, and while we talked about Archives and Collections I began to see how the two were similar.

Things in Compactus units are a big part of our business

At a very simple level, Collections manage things on shelves, and describes the context around them – and (simplistically!) so do Archives.  So there was a commonality there to start with, and when I dug deeper I found that the Archives profession also did things like Digital Preservation (more than just file storage!) which would benefit the Collections area.  And there are a few other things that work in the opposite direction as well – such as data standards, controlled vocabularies, and other open source software such as CollectiveAccess, which we’re looking at for other organisations.

So we started learn about this Archives profession, investigated the open source options such as AtoM and Archivematica, and after a lot of hard work and research we find ourselves now working with a range of Archives around Australia.   My attendance at the ASA conferences (and becoming a member) has been part of what I think is a really important investment – I think it’s irresponsible for us to offer services to an industry we don’t understand, so that’s why we are there.

Giving back

This different perspective on Archives – from a little bit “outside” of it – is something I was able to start to disseminate back to the profession in two events before the 2017 ASA conference – firstly, at the ASA New South Wales branch meeting late in 2016, and earlier in 2017 at the ASA Victoria event (as wrapped up in the Smaller Archives, Technology and Forever blog).  At the 2017 ASA conference I was involved in two separate workshops – which I was happy to do as a way of giving back to the community that has helped stretch us as a company.

Our first workshop was facilitated by Fraser Faithful (from the Good Shepherd Australia New Zealand) and was almost a re-run of the February workshop, called “Striking a Balance: Archival software workshop for small and medium archives”.  I struggled to work out what to bring along, so I packaged up a big slide deck and brought the whole lot along, but I did focus on presenting just a few key parts of that slide deck.  And so, I put forward some planning tips for Archival projects, busted a few myths about open source (see our previous Disadvantages of Open Source blog) and also let the attendees know that the community around open source Archival software is growing – and we’re there to help out if they need it.  It was also great to hear about the low-level entry software, like FACIT’s Excel spreadsheet and the HDMS system, and it was great to have a practitioner like Jeff Palmer, who is also one of our clients for Archival software support (both AtoM and Archivematica) present on the journey that he’s been on in his institution.

Jeff explaining the journey we’ve been on together for his Archives implementation

The second workshop, called “Towards descriptive synthesis: systems, standards and open source software” and this was held on the last day of the conference.  This was a much ‘bigger’ scoped workshop – really asking the question about how does the Archives profession implement the Australian Series System within open source software – and to help move the whole profession towards a ‘standard’ implementation of the Australian Series System.  I set up again with another slide deck, and picked components of this again to illustrate some of the more technical aspects.  While I focused on the technical side; Lise Summers (SROWA) and Barbara Reed (Recordkeeping Innovation) guided the attendees through the intricacies of the Series System.  And, to top that off, we’ve also given each attendee a login to an instance of the latest version of AtoM (which we are hosting here at Gaia Resources) to see what it can do for them.

Workshops are great, and all, but what were the outcomes for the people there?  Well, from the first one, smaller organisations got more assistance in planning a way forward for the Archives in their organisation, and in the bigger one, we put together a roadmap for how the Archival profession could develop a ‘standard’ way forward.  The second one has already stirred up a lot of action from some of the professional members I got to meet (and I’m still trying to keep up with!).

From my own perspective, I got a few things out of it – but the most interesting one was just how many institutions were using open source software like AtoM, and how far some of the institutions involved have gone with it – to hear from a small school that they’ve been using it for several years was a great morale booster for me.

Lise in mid workshop – explaining the intricacies of the Australian Series System

Why did I need a morale boost? Well, as the saying goes, lies can run around the world before the truth has got its boots on, and the Archives profession – especially around software – is full of unknowns, half-truths and outright fabrications.  So a lot of the workshop was about explaining what was going on, and how things were really going, and that was hard work – especially in an era of #fakenews, which – to be honest – I thought Archivists would be more immune to!

Learning

I spent the two days between the two workshops in the main program streams for the conference, trying to learn as much as I could.  The main program at the conference this year didn’t teach me as much as last year – maybe because in between our work with all our clients, and in many discussions with people like Barbara and Lise, had meant that I’ve started to wear a virtual cardigan myself.

The theme that emerged was “Archivists as social justice warriors”, and it was something I had seen here and there in the last conference.  It was probably spurred on by the topic of choice this year “Diverse Worlds” – and by the two keynote speeches that were given at the start and end of the conference by people who had deliberately disowned the profession; many in between railed at the institutions and the biases, and histories, that exist around the Archives.

However, what struck me from the conference was that there was a fair bit of complaining, but not a lot of solutions or suggestions to move forward or make things better.  In my mind, providing constructive ways forward would have been a much more useful outcome as an audience member.  So, as the conference main program ended with a very powerful keynote about Archives and social justice, I was left with the feeling I didn’t learn a lot about how to move forward (and so, that redoubled my efforts in delivering my final workshop).

As I’ve reflected – and indeed, as I wrote this very blog – I have come to realise that this is where my frustration from the conference came from.  I felt like I had been sitting around watching a profession talk about itself – something I know all too well from my dealings with the spatial “industry” (and that’s a separate blog!).

So, what’s next?

So let me put my own constructive ways forward on the table.

From the two workshops, I am preparing a few things at the moment:

• An outline for a small archive about how they can move forward with Archives and get started along the path to the Australian Series System,
• An outline (in conjunction with a core group from the second workshop) about how – as a profession – the Archives can move towards a standard implementation of the Australian Series System.

I’ve already been discussing both of these with our colleagues and collaborators at Artefactual (who are the lead developers of AtoM and Archivematica, and due to time zone differences between Perth and Vancouver mean I have 7am video conferences!), where we’ve been discussing how to support the profession and what services they will need – and how to improve the open source software even more in the future.  I’m also doing a few other things – a bunch of specific follow ups with people I’ve met at the conference – but one of the ones I’ll be focusing on shortly is to create a map showing all the Collection and Archive organisations that use open source software in Australia.  Stay tuned for that one!

Finally, and importantly for us as a business, we’re packaging up some services and solutions for Archive organisations (both big and small), based on what people asked for at the conference.  That will mean we’ll have a clear offering for Archives in the very near future, that means that they don’t have to do it alone – and we will be there to help them.

It will be interesting to see how far we will have come – and if I start dreaming of electric sheep! – by the time we attend the ASA 2018 conference (“Archives in a Blade Runner Age”), here in Perth next year!  By then I might even have my own cardigan… but in the meantime, if you want to talk about Archives, then drop me a line, or start a conversation with us on social media (Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn).

Piers

P.S. By the way – GO SEE BLADE RUNNER 2049 IT IS EXCELLENT (although cardigan free).

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Fraser Faithfull, Mike Jones and Ailie Smith did a great job of setting the scene for the morning, and what really got me thinking about where we are today in the digital archives space was the introductory session.  Each of the attendees introduced themselves and mentioned the systems that they were using – and there were plenty…

Logos of the systems mentioned during the introductions

The plethora of systems that are in use are something that we suspected, but to see it confirmed was a little bit daunting.  There’s a lot of complexity, a lot of investment and a lot of hope pinned on these systems.

I gave a bit of a messy presentation about our work with AtoM, Archivematica and a little CollectiveAccess, which I ended up jumping around in a bit based on where the audience wanted me to go – I’ve pulled out a selection of the most relevant slides I discussed in the copy of my presentation embedded below.

A revised version of the presentation I gave – just focusing on the areas I discussed.

A few things came up in my mind as we were talking through the presentations, and these can be split into observations about the technological side of Archives, and those about the Archives profession itself.

Technological musings

Firstly, there seems to be some sort of a progression of systems for organisations.  Starting with paper, groups seem to move to digital catalogues, using tools like Microsoft Excel, then to desktop based systems (e.g. HDMS) and then they start to look at larger systems to deal with scalability and getting Archives online.  Systems like AtoM, Archivematica and so on are at the more complex end of that progression; but they are also things that you need to consider.

When you think about Archives, you need to think about the timeframe.  Archives are “forever”.  This isn’t just a throwaway conceptual notion – this is literally what they aim for – that archives will always be there for the future.  Now, with my IT hat on, not very many IT systems are being designed to match, and most have a 5-10 year cycle before they reach their “end of life” and need to be replaced.

One of the ways that systems can be extended is through open sourcing them.  Systems like HDMS, which are currently closed source (of sorts) could be open sourced (e.g. under a licence like the Creative Commons Non-Commercial) and then, when anyone does work on it, everyone can get the benefits.  This also means that it’s not up to the one group to manage and maintain it, and this load can be spread around.

Archival musings

I’m certainly not qualified to comment on the Archival profession (I’ve still got “L” plates on my virtual cardigan), but there are some things that I was contemplating during the workshop.

Presenting (sans cardigan) at the workshop

For some organisations, especially smaller ones, there are still quite a few basic steps to be solved before the technology should even be considered.  In my recent road mapping workshops (e.g. Geelong Heritage Centre, and the University of Melbourne) we started from scratch, and often the first question to ask is what data do they have and how do they want to manage it, and this means looking at standards, like ISAD(G) and the Australian Series System (there’s a nice document here by Chris Hurley on this).  Some of the attending organisations hadn’t heard of these standards before; this shows just how far the industry still needs to go to support the smaller archives and to make sure that they are able to benefit from the skills and learnings from others.

Secondly, the forthcoming digital tsunami (which might have already arrived) is something that there’s just a bit too much of a “head in the sand” approach for me not to say something.  With many archival records now being born digitally, the profession very quickly and enthusiastically needs to embrace this to make sure that this can be managed.  There were signs that this was happening at the ASA conference in Parramatta (my recap is here) – but I feel that talks like Tim Sherratt’s (his Twitter account is worth a follow!) might actually have been an outlier that is not representative of the broader profession, rather than a harbinger of things to come.

In my pessimistic moments, I can see that a “digital darkness” is going to be upon us. In a way, I have already experienced this myself by not being able to open my own historical files (e.g. I once typed up all my undergrad Uni lectures on an Apple Mac – yes, folks I once was firmly in the Apple camp, and that’s a story for another time).  But then I meet archivists like Mike, Ailie, Jarrod and others – younger folks who then say nonchalant things like “I am setting up my own Archivematica server at home to manage my photos”, and this brings a little ray of hope back to my day.

So, what does it all mean?

The million dollar question.  If you are a small Archive, then here’s some ideas.

• Invest some of your time (not your money) into learning about relevant standards.  There is a role that the ASA could play here in guiding smaller Archives here, with simple standards documentation and templates (something we are currently doing with Collections in Tasmania, but that’s for Morgan to espouse later).
• Secondly, plan out the future as best you can.  If you are planning for “forever” then you need to take some time to work out how best to deal with the challenges (e.g. born digital archives) that are coming.  We have seen a lot of interest in our roadmapping exercises, and perhaps that’s something we can run at a future ASA conference, more generically.
• Thirdly, take small steps.  Moving from a paper based system to a full Archival Management System – with Digital Preservation included – is not a step to take lightly.  You might want to instead move just a few steps along that progression outlined previously, and in doing so, consider how much you need to do to bring the entire organisation along with you (e.g. training, building skillsets, implementing new technology, migrating data, etc).
• My suggested fourth – and final – step is to undertake regular review.  Keep an eye on how you are progressing against the road map, and look out for what we call the “driverless car” coming at you.  Don’t be the taxi industry, or even Uber – when the real game is that no one will be driving cars at all in the future.

That last statement might be a pronouncement I will look back on in the future and laugh at how wrong I was, but I fear that no one in the future will ever know, because this is a born digital blog – and there’s still a fair way to go before I’d feel sure that it will be preserved “forever”.  However, there is hope – and we’ll keep volunteering and working with groups like the ASA to try to help as well.

Piers

P.S. You know the usual – you can keep up with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

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My ASA talk – also available from Slideshare

Most of my talk was about our work with the State Records Office of Western Australia (which I’ve probably blogged enough about already).  But it also makes reference to a few other things, including the work we’ve been doing with Barbara, James and the team at Artefactual in Canada, including:

• Making all our customisations with the State Records Office WA available,
• More investigations around the Australian Series System, and
• Developing our services around this area for the Archive – and wider – community.

When we talk about the community here we are talking what has become known as the GLAM sector, covering Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (Herbaria get a bit of a bum deal here).   There’s a slight longer acronym of GLAMURR (which includes Universities, Research and Records) but that feels a bit like the acronym drives the terms!  Anyway, this sector has become really quite intriguing to me personally, since my days of doing fieldwork with staff from the Western Australian Museum, and being educated on what “collections” were.

As a result, there are two “stay tuned” components to this blog article.

The first, relating to the Australian Series System, is something that we will be working on via a collaborative approach between Gaia Resources, Recordkeeping Innovation, Hudson Molonglo and Artefactual.  While we’ve implemented the Series System at the State Records office of WA, we will be starting a new initiative at the ASA national conference that is coming up in a few weeks in Parramatta.  Barbara will be leading a ‘lightning talk’ on the Wednesday where we will be discussing how we are looking to operationalise the Australian Series System across the open source platforms we support, including AtoM and ArchivesSpace.  We really want to get involvement from the end users as well, so we’re doing this in an open and collaborative fashion.*

The second “stay tuned” component is to look at the offerings we are making to the GLAM community.  In terms of collection management, we already work with the AtoM and CollectiveAccess open source platforms, and this is supplemented with Hudson Molonglo’s support of ArchivesSpace as well.  So as a collective, we can provide support for several of the GLAM sectors straight away.  We can also provide support for digital preservation though our work (and ongoing relationship with Artefactual) via Archivematica.  In particular, digital preservation has a lot to offer the broader GLAM sector (and that is a blog in itself for the future).

As a collective, we are developing a few different solutions here for the GLAM community, including:

• Creating roadmaps to collection management or digital preservation – how do you get there from where you are at now,
• Implementing collection management systems – like AtoM, ArchivesSpace or CollectiveAccess, and then customising them to suit your needs,
• Implementing digital preservation systems – using Archivematica as our main platform of choice, in conjunction with other services like cloud based storage,
• Migrating data from your existing systems to the new ones,
• Hosting your systems for you, including providing these services through cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, and
• Supporting you and your organisation before, during and after this type of transition.

We already have a few new projects starting up in the coming months around these services, and we are looking at how best to resource and implement this.  It’s going to be another interesting time here at Gaia Resources – so hence the “stay tuned”!  And of course, you can do that through this blog, or through Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Piers

* As a footnote, the new Records In Context (RIC) standard will likely also have a role to play here – and that’s something we’re also investigating.

The post When Collections become GLAM appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The State Records Office new online Portal

The full history of the project is well wrapped up by Lise Summers from SRO on their blog and a good summary is also in the AtoM wiki under the “Success Stories” part of their wiki.  So with those other summaries out there, what we thought we’d cover in this blog was our experience along the way, and some of the open source technologies we’ve used as well, with the focus being on Access to Memory (AtoM).

We’re no stranger to open source products, given we have produced our own (namely the BDRS) and we work with a number of others, including CollectiveAccess.  AtoM is an open source product, and so we’ve been working with the developers as well, and have contributed a range of things back to the codebase.  We’ve created or upgraded a bunch of AtoM functionality including loans, reports, importing data, user registration, as well as the inclusion of the Australian Series System.

Technically, we implemented the Australian Series System by creating new plugins, one based on the  built-in International Standard Archival Description plugin (for archival descriptions), one based on the International Standard Archival Authority Record plugin (for agencies/”actors”), and one for accessions (consignments), but with modifications in each to suit the Australian Series System.  Then we changed the routing rules so that everything goes through our plugins rather than the built-in “International Standard” ones.  Now that we’ve had a chance to catch our breath on this project, we’ll be looking at pushing up all these contributions to the source code for AtoM in the near future, so that they become available to the entire archives community.

We implemented AtoM within the infrastructure of the SRO’s host Department, the Department of Culture and the Arts. We’re planning to extend this work further by doing more on the digital archives– the plan is to ehance the system with the use of the open source Archivematica software. The work we have done with DCA for AtoM was, in part, a pilot for Archivematica, and for a specific reason – the State Records Act.  This Act prescribes where you can store archives, and to do so on servers that are not hosted in Australia would be in breach of this Act.  So, we have worked with the DCA infrastructure team to use the virtualised environments available to ensure that we are not in breach of this important piece of legislation, when we start working on digital archives. This will be another step towards providing the full digital archive component within the State Records Office.

Behind the scenes over the last few years of working with the SRO we’ve had a number of our staff involved in the project.  Over the course of three years, Steph, Mel, James, Lyn, Debbie, me, Serge, Adam, AJ, Kehan and Ben New have all participated in this project, and it’s been thanks to Kehan, Ben New and AJ getting it over the line in the last few months that we now have a project to celebrate. As a result of all this work – and a range of other projects on collections – we’ve now developed an internal “Collections team” – but that’s a blog post for another time.

We’ve learned a lot from this project (especially about archives, as well as archivists!) and it’s been another one of those proud moments where a lot of hard work has delivered a great outcome.

Piers

The post Archives online appeared first on Gaia Resources.