Page History

Review of current status of DAMI project

Discussion

Mike's questions for Katie:
Do you want to continue doing your description and arrangement in ArchivesSpace, or do you want to do it in the DAMS?

-KR prefers ArchivesSpace, since it is the system of record. raises the question that metadata creation within the DAMS will be necessary if there are different metadata requirements for DAMS? ER says DAMS should do what we need it to do with metadata, and censhare/Avyre have experience with ArchivesSpace migrations to censhare.

-BG: fundamental difference between archival processes and description. in special collections field, item level description is not the norm. ER: we may or may not need item level in DAMS, we will talk to vendor about how this works. Folder level descriptions mimic the experience of a reading room. We do this because of the volume of content we receive.

-MD: so clarification that SC does not plan to expand into additional item-level description. So what work would SC be doing in the DAMS? KR: changes would need to be mirrored in the DAMS. What functionality of DAMS is useful/efficient in DAMS in that case for SC? KR: bulk updates are possible in censhare, per Katie's research into censhare functionality. Should also give us a better understanding of what has been scanned if it all goes into DAMS–connecting things to finding aids (similar to tracksys function). KR has been hesitant to connect things to tracksys because sense is they will need to be connected to DAMS in future, and connected to finding aids. BG: we plan to use DAMS a great deal. Students and researchers will be pointed to DAMS to pull items down, and they should be able to do this without item level description. That is a thing the DAMS can do that SC cannot do with current systems. Pulling things from tracksys, DPLA, LoV for resources was not best option during pandemic for class resources.

What functions does DAMS need for it to be most useful to SC? Find by collection (MSS #, etc), title of collection, subject (KR has a list of fields she thinks are most useful). 

BG/MD: where does metadata come from? from existing description, then there would need to be new links to DAMS for searching that. Not new description, though linking is new.

If you keep ArchivesSpace, how much of the ArchivesSpace information do you want in the DAMS?  Is seems like the least overlap would be to have the items in the DAMS mirror the physical arrangement (ie, grouped by box and folder).  Then those items could be manually added as digital objects in ArchivesSpace.   With such a light coupling, folks could only find stuff in the DAMS based on the folder or box, or any additional item-level description that was added in that system.   This is essentially what tracksys does now.

At the other end is that all the description and organization is stored in the DAMS.  This would allow for maximum discoverability within the DAMS (you could search on all that stuff), but would require a new description workflow to be established, and makes the most sense if you're moving away from ArchivesSpace because then there wouldn't be the same information maintained and synchronized between two different systems.