[Yale ArchivesSpace] ArchivesSpace Public User Interface update, May 2016

[Custer, Mark]

Dear finding-aid enthusiasts:


Last year, the library’s project review committee approved the proposal to replace YFAD with the ArchivesSpace public interface, but only after the ArchivesSpace public interface itself had been updated and improved.  Since that time, I have been focusing a lot of my efforts to ensure that not only will the new ArchivesSpace public interface be a suitable replacement for YFAD, but that it will also provide significant improvements to our researchers and staff members at Yale, as well as for any other repositories outside of Yale who adopt the ArchivesSpace public interface (which, by my last count, was nearly 30 different institutions already).

At this point, we are still about a year away before we will implement the new ArchivesSpace public interface, but I am writing now in order to provide an update regarding the development progress — and I am planning to write these monthly updates near the end of each month until we launch the new version of YFAD. Although this first update could be much longer, I will be keeping it somewhat short by focusing on: 1) what’s been done so far, and 2) what we are working on until the end of June.

As for what’s been done so far, please check out this group of pages on the ArchivesSpace wiki: https://archivesspace.atlassian.net/wiki/display/ADC/Public+Interface+Enhancement+Project

There is a lot of information on this website — even full-length recordings of almost all of our group meetings — but the primary takeaway from this stage of the project is that we worked with a user experience design firm, the Cherry Hill company, from July - December 2015 to come up with a series of recommendations and wireframes that are guiding the development of the new public interface.  All of the wireframes that Cherry Hill produced, as well as their final report, are available here: http://cherryhill.github.io/aspace_pui/index.html

In future updates, I’ll focus on key differences from the new ArchivesSpace Public Interface and our current YFAD website.  Many of these changes are described or hinted at in the wireframes, but I think that they’ll be a lot easier for me to explain once we have a test version of the new ArchivesSpace Public Interface set up that’s using our entire local database.  Once that’s done, I’ll focus in on specific changes, one at a time, by providing “before” and “after” screenshots and URLs.

Another major milestone that I am delighted to mention is the meeting that took place at Harvard from May 19-20.  Melissa Wisner and Matthew Gorham joined me at that meeting, and I am happy to report that before the meeting concluded, Harvard agreed to have one of their developers, Bobbi Fox, work on the ArchivesSpace Public Interface project full time for the next six months.  This is wonderful news.  Although Brian Hoffman, a developer at LYRASIS, was working full time on the project up until about March of this year, he unfortunately had to cut his time back to just 10 hours per work, which meant that the development of the project slowed down quite a bit earlier this year.  However, now that Bobbi is starting to work on the project, we have a full development team once again, which means that our core testing group is going to have a busy summer ahead.

As for what we'll be doing in June, this is where things get really exciting!  As I just mentioned, Bobbi has recently joined the project, and she will be providing her very first updates to the core code this month.  In addition to Bobbi, Yale is also contracting with a vendor, Hudson Molonglo, to work on the ArchivesSpace Public Interface from June - August.  The entire development group will be holding its kickoff meeting the evening of June 14th, Flag Day. I will definitely have more to say about the results of that meeting by the time of my next update, and if you’re really curious, you can see the full list of the tasks that are ahead of us at the following website: https://archivesspace.atlassian.net/secure/RapidBoard.jspa?rapidView=3&view=planning&quickFilter=11&selectedEpic=AR-1113

I'll write again next month with another update.  In the meantime, if anyone has any questions or suggestions, please let me know.

All my best,

Mark Custer

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