Archive Management System: project update, December 2020-January 2021

This is a regular report on the progress of the Archive Management System (AMS) Project. The project will end at the end of April 2021 and the team is focused on completing remaining tasks. 

Migrations  

We have now successfully completed the migrations of all the legacy datasets: it is excellent to have reached this milestone and delivered a key project objective. Here are current statistics for the records on the system and the final statistics for the migration programme. In all 876,759 records were migrated from 23 Cantab datasets, 2 AtoM datasets and a single bespoke system that had been used for the Charles Darwin archive (‘Darbase’):

Total resources: 13838 

Migrated from AtoM: 11754 

Migrated from Cantab: 1954 

Migrated from Darbase: 1 

Total archival objects: 846186 

Migrated from AtoM: 150684 

Migrated from Cantab: 552690 

Migrated from Darbase: 117942 

Digital objects:

Total digital objects: 41791 

Migrated from Darbase: 41734 

Technical progress 

Regular users of the system will have noticed an improvement in the site’s performance- we were able to make progress on this just before Christmas thanks to information from the Bodleian Library. Information and knowledge sharing is proving to be a great benefit to being part of the larger ArchivesSpace community and we are very grateful to the Bodleian for working with us on this.  

The site has also been upgraded to the latest version of ArchivesSpace (version 2.8.1).  

New feature: Filter by UL ARCHON Code 

Catalogue metadata for all the archive collections held at the University Library has been brought together in the Cambridge University Library repository on ArchivesSpace. A new filter has been added so that search results can be filtered by CUL ARCHON code. This is to provide a straightforward way of limiting search results to a specific department within the University Library (e.g. Map Department) or to a large collection (e.g. Cambridge University Archives). For other repositories, the built-in filter allowing search results to be limited to a specific repository serves the same purpose.  

Guidance for ArchiveSearch users 

A LibGuide has been published explaining how to use ArchiveSearch as a discovery tool. The LibGuide is aimed at an external audience. It covers the questions and issues which were raised by users surveyed during user experience interviews carried out as part of the AMS project and has been reviewed by the Library’s new Accessibility team. It is linked to from the home page and in the footer of ArchiveSearch pages.

Janus decommissioning and links to ArchiveSearch 

We are now working through the process of decommissioning Janus and a notice has been added to the Janus homepage warning external users that the site is no longer being actively maintained and will not be available after winter/late spring this year. 

Natalie Adams and Katrina Dean