Archive Management System: project update April 2021

This is a regular report on the progress of the Archive Management System (AMS) Project. The project ends at the end of April and the team is working hard to complete the remaining tasks. 

Janus switch off

The 1 March marked a significant milestone for the project as Janus was switched off. Janus had provided access to finding aids for archives held in Cambridge for almost 20 years: testament to both to collaboration between a group of Cambridge archivists and to the talent and generosity of Dr Martin Oldfield, the site’s technical consultant.

Janus has been archived on the UK Web Archive and Janus URLs are redirected to ArchiveSearch. The project team contacted all Janus partners and offered them the source files for the content published on Janus. Those Janus partners that wanted the source files have now taken custody of their data. Usage statistics for visits to Janus addresses are being monitored and have been declining since the 1 March and there has been a corresponding increase in usage of ArchiveSearch. Thank you very much to all partners for their help in communicating with their users and for ongoing efforts updating links.

Invoices

Thank you to all the partners who have paid their invoices for this year. Payment is now due for this year.

Technical progress 

Recent improvements include:-

• Addition of reference codes to the hierarchical ‘collection organization’ display making it much easier to identify and browse for material
• Improvement of searching for reference codes – it is now possible to limit a search to the reference code field and retrieve records at all levels of description
• Improvement to the relevance ranking of search results- specifically when the search term is found in an agent record and when searching within collections
• Improvement to options for exporting data:
  • on ArchiveSearch PDF files can now be exported below the resource (or top level) of a heirarchical description
  • on the staff user interface it is now possible to export EAD files below resource level

AMS User Group

The second meeting of the AMS User Group took place this month. Minutes of meetings of the User Group can be found on the AMS Intranet site. Thanks to suggestions from the User Group, additional items have been added to the ‘Top Tips and FAQs’ on the AMS Intranet pages. Further suggestions are welcome!  

iDiscover

Resource (top level) descriptions from ArchiveSearch and from Cambridge repositories using AtoM are now available on iDiscover. Please review how your data appears on iDiscover: if any changes are needed to the way your repository is described please contact: alma-helpdesk@lib.cam.ac.uk.

ArchivesHub

The Project team had a useful meeting with Jane Stevenson of the ArchivesHub. Work is continuing on exploring data sharing mechanisms with the Hub.

New contact addresses

In preparation for transition to ‘business as usual’ for the Archive Management System after the end of the project in April, there are new email addresses to use to report issues with the site. There are links to these addresses in the footer of each page on the staff interface and on ArchiveSearch:

archivesspace@lib.cam.ac.uk for issues with the staff user interface

archivesearch@lib.cam.ac.uk for issues with ArchiveSearch.

Best wishes,

Natalie Adams and Katrina Dean