The Espy Project

Building Digital Infrastructure

University Archives

• Collect permanent university records

• Make them accessible

Traditional Practices

• Collecting during office moves, when storage areas get crowded

• Call the University Archivist for information

The University Archives

• University Records
  • Office of the President
  • University Senate
  • University Council
  • Office of the Provost
  • Graduate & Undergraduate Education
    • Records of Schools and Colleges
    • Records of Academic Departments
  • Web Archives
• Student Groups and Manuscripts
  • Student Association
  • Albany Student Press
  • Faculty and Alumni Papers

Building a Modern Collecting Program

• Automated digital transfers
• Web crawling
• Disk imaging of external media
• Paper when maintained as such
• Format-neutral practices
• Requires digital infrastructure

Born-Digital Records Collecting in Practice

• Files On the Live Web
  • Web crawling
• Files dispersed around the University
  • Local Computers
  • Network Shares
  • Cloud Storage
  • Different Software Applications
  • Private Computers

Ben Goldman, “Outfitting a Born-Digital Archives Program”
Practical Technology for Archives   Issue 2 (June 2014)

Establishing a Collecting Program

Transfer Scripts

• Network Folder Share
  • Archives and creator has access
• Python script run on task scheduler
• Weekly checks for new files
• CSV log files of files transferred
• Creates XML accession metadata file
• Runs createSIP.py command line tool
• Enters line in accessions.xlsx
• Manual collecting over GoogleDrive

Establishing a Collecting Program

• \\LINCOLN\Library\UA200

• Transfer Script

Establishing a Collecting Program

Establishing a Collecting Program

Current Storage

• \\romeo\SPE\ua200-7VsAhYXbfYg3EKXaypCJeD

Current Access System

• University Senate Records
• Luna DAMS
• Digital Media Department

Maintenance

• Scripts break over time
  • No more ad-hoc approaches
  • No more XML data stores
• Network of well-maintained interoperable tools

Introduction to APIs

• Wayback Machine

• Wayback Machine API

• Archive-It
• Page for Crawl
• API for Crawl

What can you do with APIs?

• ArchivesSpace
• Office of Diversity and Inclusion
• ArchivesSpace API
  • python2
  • from archives_tools import aspace as AS
  • session = AS.getSession()
  • odi = AS.getResource(session, “2”, “415”)
  • AS.pp(odi)
  • print odi.title
  • print odi.finding_aid_author

APIs: Solving Problems with Maintainable Solutions

• David Baldus Papers
• C:\Projects\asInventory
  • python2 asDownload.py
  • 16b7133df26424617e649391b53ea6ce

Separation of Concerns: Smaller Tools

• Find-it
• Director of Planning Records
• Box uploader
• \\libstaff\wwwroot\find-it

An Interoperable Repository with APIs

• ArchivesSpace for Managing Metadata
  • Spreadsheet tool
  • Find-it
• Archive-It for Web Archives
• Hyrax Repository for Digital Storage

Portland Common Data Model

API Access Allows Maintainable Workflows

• [API Access]

Open, Interconnected Workflows

1. Detect accession
2. Get contextual data from ArchivesSpace API
3. Ingest into digital repository
4. Que for review
5. Expose data into central search index

An Interoperable Repository with APIs

An Interoperable Repository with APIs

• ArchivesSpace for Managing Metadata
  • Spreadsheet tool
  • Find-it
• Archive-It for Web Archives
• Hyrax Repository for Digital Storage
• Arclight for Public Access

APIs also Make Access Possible

What it will Look Like

• Arclight

Repository Supports

• University Records Collecting
• API access to collections
  • Enables new research
• On-Demand Digitization
• Born-Digital Outside Collecting
  • New York Modern Political Archive
  • National Death Penalty Archive

New Possibilities

• Espy Metadata Tool

The Espy Project

Building Digital Infrastructure