5
side 3 We provide installation instructions in our documentation. You will need to have a web server, preferably running Linux although installations have been done in other environments too. There are a number of software dependencies that you’ll need to have installed all are listed in our docs. This installation is advanced you are likely an IT person if you are attempting it. If you want to have your own AtoM installation just to test with, we also have instructions to download and install a Virtual Box version. This installation is possible for the relatively techsavvy. You can also use the publicly available demo site, but data is deleted periodically. If you do not have IT support and you cannot install the software yourself, you might consider a hosted version. Artefactual Systems offers a variety of hosting plans on an annual basis. The prices are nonprofit friendly. slide 4 Many Canadian institutions are using AtoM locally as well as contributing to their provincial portal. Their reasons could be: Greater control over the look and feel of the site, menu labels, and other customizable aspects of the interface Set your own policies for digital objects, in terms of the size you upload and how they display. Use the internal aspects accession records, donor records, make your own static pages, etc. Some institutions that have their own AtoM installation send their records to Amanda to upload to Archeion via an EAD export, which you can do out of AtoM with a click and file download. slide 5 Possibly. How easy that is to do will depend on the format it comes in. In general, AtoM can import two different kinds of data files EAD or CSV. CSV needs to be formatted in a specific way for AtoM to be able to understand it we provide instruction in our documentation. If your data is in some other machinereadable format, like XML which is not EAD formatted, then it may be possible to write a script to transform it into something that AtoM can interpret. Data migration is something that you can contract us to do, or you can have inhouse/other developers look at your data. slide 6 We’ve built AtoM purposefully so that it can have a different theme as a plugin. A

Getting Started with AtoM and Archivematica for Digital Preservation and Access- notes

Embed Size (px)

Citation preview

Page 1: Getting Started with AtoM and Archivematica for Digital Preservation and Access- notes

side 3 We provide installation instructions in our documentation. You will need to have a web

server, preferably running Linux although installations have been done in other environments too. There are a number of software dependencies that you’ll need to have installed­ all are listed in our docs. This installation is advanced­ you are likely an IT person if you are attempting it.

If you want to have your own AtoM installation just to test with, we also have instructions to download and install a Virtual Box version. This installation is possible for the relatively tech­savvy. You can also use the publicly available demo site, but data is deleted periodically.

If you do not have IT support and you cannot install the software yourself, you might consider a hosted version. Artefactual Systems offers a variety of hosting plans on an annual basis. The prices are non­profit friendly.

slide 4 Many Canadian institutions are using AtoM locally as well as contributing to their

provincial portal. Their reasons could be: Greater control over the look and feel of the site, menu labels, and other

customizable aspects of the interface Set your own policies for digital objects, in terms of the size you upload and how

they display. Use the internal aspects ­ accession records, donor records, make your own

static pages, etc. Some institutions that have their own AtoM installation send their records to Amanda to

upload to Archeion via an EAD export, which you can do out of AtoM with a click and file download.

slide 5 Possibly. How easy that is to do will depend on the format it comes in. In general, AtoM

can import two different kinds of data files­ EAD or CSV. CSV needs to be formatted in a specific way for AtoM to be able to understand it­ we provide instruction in our documentation.

If your data is in some other machine­readable format, like XML which is not EAD formatted, then it may be possible to write a script to transform it into something that AtoM can interpret.

Data migration is something that you can contract us to do, or you can have in­house/other developers look at your data.

slide 6 We’ve built AtoM purposefully so that it can have a different theme as a plugin. A

Page 2: Getting Started with AtoM and Archivematica for Digital Preservation and Access- notes

developer would need to write the code. AtoM versions 2 and above come with two themes­ Dominion and ArchivesCanada. The ArchivesCanada theme is built off of the Dominion theme­ so developers can look at it and use it as a model for how to write their own theme. Here are some examples of nice looking AtoM sites:

slide 10 The great part about being part of an open source community is you can feel a sense of

ownership over the direction of the project. We encourage participation from any AtoM user to contribute ideas of how the software could be improved. Artefactual Systems works on what’s called the “bounty model” of software development­ new features are sponsored by a user or institution, and when the next public release of the software is made, we incorporate those sponsored features.

If you don’t have sponsorship dollars, you can still contribute ideas for improvements in our user forum. We maintain a wishlist of things that the community has suggested and when there is a good fit with a sponsoring institution, we try to “shop” it to them.

Developments proposed by institutions are not automatically incorporated into the public project. We archivists help steer the project to make sure that new features are generally usable by the community at large.

The other way to contribute is through code. If you or someone at your institution has written custom code for an AtoM feature, you can submit a pull request. We do our best to include these in the next public release of the software­ sometimes it takes a while, or takes additional sponsors, to help clean the code up and make it appropriate for general use.

slide 11 Notable additions to the latest release of AtoM (version 2.2): Generate finding aids­ you can create RAD compliant finding aids in RTF or PDF format,

and control whether they contain all the available descriptive fields or are a “inventory summary” format.

Create a PREMIS rights statement that controls whether or not the public can see a digital object (or whether they can see the full size or only the thumbnail, etc).

Dates of creation (of the records) added to the accessions template Some general usability enhancements ­ better Settings page, “Part of” information

included when browsing descriptions, new search icon and revised browse menu. slide 12 AtoM version 2.3 will likely be released late this calendar year or maybe early next calendar year. Software releases are part of our community work for AtoM­ they’re not sponsored by any institution or foundation so we balance our workload to get releases out the door a couple of times a year. Version 2.3 will have: ­ ability to edit title, slug and filename of digital objects through the user interface

Page 3: Getting Started with AtoM and Archivematica for Digital Preservation and Access- notes

­ ability to strip filenames that come from Archivematica ­ accessibility enhancements including better keyboard navigability ­ table view of institutional browse ­ a “clipboard” for researchers to save groups of records ­ an optional new treeview which takes up the same width as the description column ­ much more!

slide 16 Archivematica must be installed on an ubuntu web server. To install Archivematica, you

should be comfortable logging into a server, downloading packages and running installation scripts.

Archivematica in a sense comes with three parts to install­ the dashboard, which we just looked at, a separate application called the Storage Service, and a package of dependencies so that Archivematica can run them as micro­services.

Folks often ask, how big of a server do I need? How much storage do I need? We have recommendations in our documentation, but the short answer is larger collections will require more processing space and obviously more storage space. In addition to the space you need to store the collection, you should have at least 20 additional GBs.

If you’re just trying it out, we have an online demo you can use; if you want to run tests with your own material, you might consider downloading to a desktop running Ubuntu.

slide 17 We’re offering a hosted service with DuraCloud now called ArchivesDirect. DuraCloud is

part of Duraspace, an American non­profit which is dedicated to helping libraries and archives preserve and make available digital assets. Because DuraCloud is American, the servers are in the States which causes some problems for many Canadian institutions who want to use the service.

We’re also involved in a consortial hosting systems through the Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries. The hosting is done at UBC, but is only available to COPPUL members.

Plans are in the works for a Canadian­based hosting solution for Archivematica. You can expect more news on this by early next year. We want Canadian institutions to be able to use Archivematica more easily, and by offering the system in a hosted environment, you can worry less about the tech and more about the actual archivist work needed to preserve digital material.

slide 18 There are different “flavours” or “levels” of digital preservation and I’m not here to tell you

that it’s our way or the highway. But the advantage of using a system like Archivematica is that it bundles together many discrete digital preservation tasks and runs them all on your content­ tasks like fixity checking, virus scanning, file format identification and

Page 4: Getting Started with AtoM and Archivematica for Digital Preservation and Access- notes

characterization, and normalization into formats that are considered friendly for long­term preservation and access. A repository system like Fedora or Islandora can be complemented nicely by Archivematica, allowing you to sleep a little better at night knowing that you’ve taken additional steps towards long­term digital preservation.

slide 19 Archivematica is purposefully storage agnostic, which allows it to connect to a number of

different storage options: You can store your preserved material on networked servers You can use cloud­based storage like DuraCloud or Arkivum You can use an object store like Swift You can store packages in LOCKSS Fedora storage could be experimented with at this stage In the future you’ll be able to store preservation packages in DSpace.

Archivematica comes with a Storage Service to help you manage the packages you’ve put in storage, but deciding on which type of storage to use is outside the purview of Archivematica’s activities. It’s most likely to depend on your institutional environment.

slide 20 We consider AtoM to be the “default” access system for use with Archivematica, but

other systems that have some manner of integration include CONTENTdm, Islandora, DSpace, Archivists’ Toolkit, and soon, ArchivesSpace.

You can also make packages of material for access and store them/download them and manually upload them to other systems if you desire.

Our philosophy is, your preservation system shouldn’t dictate how you provide access to your digital material. We believe in creating many possible connections between the software in your arsenal­ we like to think of it as “handshaking”.

This process can also work the other way around­ you may have an institutional repository such as DSpace into which students and faculty deposit material directly, and then you can use Archivematica to ingest that material as a preservation back­end.

slide 21 The degree of automation is largely up to you. Most of Archivematica’s processes can be

automated by changing the administrative settings in the web interface. Further automation can be achieved through special scripts that we call “automation

tools”. We have users who have Archivematica running in the background on materials with literally no human intervention unless there is an error to troubleshoot. To use these tools, you would need to alter the scripts for your particular situation­ the scripts can do things like look for particularly formated filenames, use metadata csv files to make matches between metadata and digital objects, etc.

I think of automation like this: the more uniform your materials are, the more likely you’ll

Page 5: Getting Started with AtoM and Archivematica for Digital Preservation and Access- notes

be able to take advantage of automation techniques to preserve them. For example, if you’re digitizing photographs and they’re all the same format, and you have control over how they’re created, that’s a fairly easy and automatable preservation use case. Born­digital material, which you have little to no control over, is much harder to automate workflows for. Many institutions have a mix of both of these types of use cases and many things in between.

slide 22 The best thing you can do as a start is analyze the content you need to preserve. Find

out everything you can about it­ where is it stored, what are the file formats, what kind of media is it stored on, what contextual information does it have accompanying it, how large in terms of number of files and storage space if possible.

Start with some of your easier use cases. Digitization projects are great examples because they’re relatively low risk­ you created the files, you can create multiple copies so that you can experiment with preservation workflows without major consequences if you lose material accidentally.

If you think Archivematica is a useful tool for you, watch some of our webinars on Youtube and read up in the documentation. Once you have installation figured out, you can start running test packages through the system. Again, start with something easy, understandable and low risk, and work your way up to more complex workflows.