The Bentley Historical Library is interested in the ArcLight project and its potential integration of ArchivesSpace and Hydra (as well as other projects such as Archivematica).  The Bentley and other archival repositories on the Michigan campus currently use DLXS to host EAD finding aids.  Any such integration would also have to include the Aeon reference registration and request system.  As of January 7, 2015, the Bentley Historical Library has employed Aeon to manage and track requests for physical items and duplication orders.  Aeon is also used by University of Michigan Special Collections Library and (as of May 2015) the Clements Library.

The Bentley Historical Library is currently engaged with Michigan Library Information Technology on a Mellon Foundation grant-funded project to integrate ArchivesSpace, Archivematica, and DSpace into an end-to-end digital archives workflow.  Development work will be performed by the staff of Artefactual Systems.  This project is intended to facilitate the creation and reuse of descriptive, administrative, and rights metadata between ArchivesSpace and the other systems and to streamline the deposit of fully processed digital archives into a preservation repository.

Shortly after this grant was awarded, the University of Michigan Library decided to adopt Hydra as a repository platform.  In light of this development, project staff will fulfill grant requirements by  integrating DSpace into the workflow, but care will be given to ensure that solutions for sharing data and metadata between systems will also be appropriate in a Hydra environment.  In presenting the following list, the Bentley acknowledges that some of its stated objectives/desired features and functionality may in actuality reside in the repository rather than ArcLight.

Stakeholder Goals and Objectives

Bentley Historical Library Archivists:

• Attractive, best-in-class discovery interface for archival content, flexible enough to change as quickly as best practices for web design change (it seems to only take two years for a website to look ten years old).
  
• Establish a definitive access point for archival description for Bentley Historical Library collections, providing a unified gateway to paper, analog, digital, and ‘hybrid’ collections that are described in ArchivesSpace.
  
• Support accessibility standards for all researchers, regardless of abilities.
  
• Responsive and mobile-friendly design and presentation.

• Search engine optimized: permit researchers to enter description/collections from a search engine (i.e., landing at an item).  Any such entry must provide researchers with sufficient metadata to understand context/provenance of materials and orient them to the larger collection (and the institution/archives as a whole).
  
• Support and recognize EAD elements for search and disambiguation.  At the same time, move away from presenting EAD finding aids as static objects.  A high-level graphical interface to collections that could replicate “meta-finding-aids” or subject guides is desirable, but description/metadata should allow other routes of access, including search and browsing via multiple facets.
  
• Support and recognize PREMIS rights and conditions governing access/use so these metadata are acted upon in conducting and presenting search results.  Limit access to archival components and digital objects in a range of ways based on PREMIS statements, including full embargo of highly sensitive content (such that this content would not display in public search results).
  
• Support authentication for several scenarios:
  

• Provide ‘curatorial’ view (with login credentials) that would give archivists/internal staff access to unpublished items in ArchivesSpace as well as more extensive preservation/technical metadata (possibly derived from indexing the Archivematica Storage Service and/or METS file deposited alongside AIPs).  
  
• Facilitate management of content via curatorial view, such as initiating additional preservation events (possibly from Archivematica-supplied metadata or information in Hydra repository).
  
• Provide appropriate levels of access to defined user groups: donors, members of a class, university affiliates, etc.
  

• Integration with other platforms:
  

• Aeon: permit researcher registration and request physical items from collections.  Also manage duplication requests via Aeon.

• Provide single-search stream for researchers: permit search results to include items in local catalog (Mirlyn) and HathiTrust (?) to provide fullest indication of holdings.
  
• Archive-It: access/present metadata and links from web archives directly or via ArchivesSpace
  
• Archivematica: index and search technical/preservation metadata (for curatorial view)
  
• Social media: permit users to share/promote materials in collections
  
• Metadata aggregators such as ArchiveGrid and DPLA

• Assessment through search logs, analytics, download reports, etc. (may require authentication, especially to determine impact of archival collections on undergraduate education outcomes and success).

• Index text in digital objects (including OCR’d text from scans) for full-text search results.
  
• Ability to view/search the ArchivesSpace archival objects records for digital objects as well as information about the parent resource
  
• Ensure that any updates, revisions, or additions to ASpace descriptive, administrative, and rights metadata are immediately reflected in the ArcLight interface.
  
• When components of archival collections and digital objects are presented, display a core set of descriptive and administrative metadata (including collection, series, sub-series, item, etc.) to maintain context and provenance of materials.  Include breadcrumb navigation to identify and navigate position in archival hierarchy.
  
• Integrate item-level digitized materials from reference scanning operation with larger collections (in some cases they are only described at a folder- or collection-level)
  
• Customizable and configurable text and/or tool tips to provide guidance to researchers and facilitate use of interface and collections.
  
• Support for Linked data/RDF (Still trying to wrap our minds around just what this means, but seems important--especially moving forward).

Researchers

• Integrate discovery and display/streaming of digitized/born-digital content, so that researchers don’t have to switch from a discovery layer to a repository (or repositories, which is currently the case, since we have multiple “repositories” for different media types) and back again

• Display partial or full finding aid based upon browse/search options.
  
• Search options:

• Unified search: permit users to simultaneously search for archival materials (described in ASpace) as well as digitized books in HathiTrust and items cataloged in Mirlyn

• Permit intuitive search and navigation (for those with experience with archives and those without) better than the public interface of ArchivesSpace currently does
  
• Permit faceted search and/or review of search results based upon creator, subjects, names, geographic coverage, dates, formats or media type, etc.
  
• Provide full-text search of indexable content (including OCR’d scans, plain text, PDFs, Word documents, and/or other relevant file formats)
  
• Limit searching/browsing/faceting to particular collections

• Permit fuzzy searching/approximation so that researchers do not need to know the exact spelling of subjects, names, or other keywords.
  

• Presentation:

• Permit searching and browsing of archival hierarchies/context so that users may dive in and explore aspects or components of collections and also return to ‘parent’ components as well as the main resource record.
  
• Clearly communicate the level (collection, series, sub-series, item, etc.) of description for digital objects a researcher is viewing (one interviewee suggested “captions,” for example, for images)

• Communicate relationships between physical and born-digital/digitized components of collections in a usable and meaningful way (for those with experience with archives and those without)
  
• Display metadata about the digital object that comes from the archival component (not necessarily the digital object), and does so in a way that allows for a predefined portion or all the metadata to display
  
• Preview digital content with thumbnails. One interviewee suggested that this could be mouse-over functionality (from the finding aid component). Currently these don’t exist anywhere for us, so it would be great if ArcLight/the repository could generate these on the fly (and in a way that doesn’t slow down page loading times).
  
• For complex digital objects, display files/groups of content/archival components in a meaningful way. Allow researchers to view all the files in a folder without (or files in a finding aid) without having to go back and forth to the finding aid.

• Provide the option to download digital content (individual file or all bitstreams in a complex digital object) when materials are viewed/accessed.
  
• New ways to visualize and through collections (timelines, maps, etc.)? Provide opportunity to navigate intellectual hierarchy of a finding aid or to conduct keyword, faceted, and/or full-text search of content. One interviewee suggested that levels be collapsable (with the plus and minus signs). Another suggested that hierarchy views could be toggled--similar to a file explorer in an OS--so that you could view icons/thumbnails, or get a detailed view.
  

• Provide an intuitive way to alert researchers that related finding aids, books or collections exist (this information is recorded in a finding aid, except researchers don’t usually read it--I suppose this could also be a way to use subject or name authorities). This idea was inspired by Amazon.

• Help manage researcher expectations regarding availability and immediacy of access to physical and digital content.  Interface should include a clear indication as to where a button in a finding aid or on an archival component will take researchers: i.e., to a digital collection that is fully accessible online, to a digital collection that is only available in a Reading Room, to a physical collection that can be available immediately (after the request is processed) or to a physical collection that will take time to process/retrieve. --or, I suppose, that this is a physical collection that you are requesting to be digitized, which could also take a while).  
  
• Permit users to save search results or place items in a ‘book bag’ or cart
  
• Integration with Zotero or similar tool for citation creation and management.

Library Information Technology Staff

Please add LIT-specific goals and objectives here!