Duct Tape Integration

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Alicia Detelich Boersig

ArchivesSpace Online Forum 2022

Project Goal

Develop a (mostly) automated copy order fulfillment workflow for digitized materials not available online

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Timeline

• March 2020: Manuscripts and Archives reading room closes, digital copy requests increase
• April 2020-August 2020: Manual fulfillment of orders for already-digitized materials. Turnaround time for orders 3-6 weeks.
• August 2020: Project planning begins
• September 2020-March 2021: Data enhancement, workflow development, testing, and training
• April 2021: Process fully implemented

Digital Object Usage at YUL

• Primarily a linking system
• No descriptive metadata
• Somewhat analogous to top containers

ArchivesSpace and Preservica

• ArchivesSpace-Preservica sync automatically creates metadata in ArchivesSpace upon ingest of materials into Preservica
• Unpublished digital objects
• General notes in archival object records
• Metadata from ArchivesSpace also added to Preservica

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ArchivesSpace-Preservica integration webinar: https://archivesspace.org/archives/5663

Project Rationale

• Increased volume of digitization requests requiring additional staff time - less time available to fulfill orders for already-digitized material
• Previous fulfillment process was entirely manual and thus time-consuming - 2-4 week turnaround time for orders
• Previous fulfillment process required involvement of senior staff members to complete
• Could not wait for longer-term development projects to complete

Workflow Overview

1. Public services (PS) staff receive a request for digitized materials
2. PS staff ensure customer is registered in Aeon and signs the user agreement
3. PS staff fill out tracking spreadsheet and create Quickbooks order
4. PS staff run the ‘Copy Order Fulfillment’ report in the ArchivesSpace staff interface to retrieve all Preservica digital content links for one or more collections

Workflow Overview

5. PS staff review the report CSV file and, in the first column, mark any files which should be downloaded and sent to the patron
6. PS staff save the file as a new file in a “hot folder” on the department network drive - the file naming convention should be FirstnameLastname_ordernumber.csv
7. At the end of each week a script runs via cron job which downloads the files for each order from Preservica, packages each set of files into a zip file (FirstnameLasname_ordernumber.zip), and uploads the file to Box

Workflow Overview

• A report which includes Aeon user data and links to each file in box are generated by the script, along with a set of email templates
• Digital services staff look up users in Aeon, copy the email template text into the Aeon email form, and send to the patron

Data Preparation: Adding Digital Content Links to ArchivesSpace

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• Retrieve digital file links from Preservica via Python script
• Add links as new file version to Preservica digital objects
• Create published existence and location of copies, conditions governing access notes

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Custom Reports Plugin

• Reports module refactored in 2018 to make it easier to add custom SQL queries
• Manage queries in a plugin
• Created query to retrieve all digital content links associated with a given archival object record

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Github repository: https://github.com/YaleArchivesSpace/yale-archivesspace-reports

Online forum 2021 presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruRWpOGaj1A

Custom Reports Plugin

• Reports module refactored in 2018 to make it easier to add custom SQL queries
• Manage queries in a plugin
• Created query to retrieve all digital content links associated with a given archival object record

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Github repository: https://github.com/YaleArchivesSpace/yale-archivesspace-reports

Online forum 2021 presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruRWpOGaj1A

Training

• Zoom training session for all public services and digital services staff
• Individual training sessions as needed
• Troubleshooting as needed
• Documentation: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PDmv2A9ZtvZnMslxwWsyAArVO8Wwn9OEbrhgHzqiGig

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Results

• Decreased order fulfillment time by 2-3 weeks
• Reduced involvement of senior staff members
• Sent nearly 4,000 files to patrons

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The Future

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• Digital Collections System (DCS) development
• ArchivesSpace digital copy request development
• ArchivesSpace digital material identification and filtering
• Aeon development, access to Aeon API
• Preservica v6 upgrade
• Centralized digitization services
• Administrative changes in special collections

Thanks!

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Email: alicia.detelich@yale.edu

Project github: https://github.com/yalemssa/copy_order_fulfillment

Data enhancement: https://github.com/yalemssa/digital_data

Preservica API work: https://github.com/yalemssa/aspace_preservica_db