The Alliance supports archival collection management with ArchivesSpace.
Principles
- Our intention in implementing ArchivesSpace is to replace the collection management functions of the predecessor tool, Archivist’s Toolkit. We expect all A&M participating institutions will continue to use Archives West as the main mechanism for researcher access, also understanding that the ability to expose accession records in ArchivesSpace may necessitate the use of the public portal locally.
- Like any tool, ArchivesSpace has many options for how you use it. By working together on documentation, setup, and use, we reduce the number of decisions you are required to make as an institution while enabling your autonomy where that is appropriate.
- As we understand it, low costs are of the utmost importance. We also have a commitment to quality. This may mean sacrifices in speed.
- Hosting ArchivesSpace is technically complex. You and your IT staff have many other things to do with your time. With both hosting and implementation, we save time and resources by centralizing hosting.
- Our focus is standards compliance and basic functionality before customization and variant practices. We take a shared approach to tool setup that supports standards compliance and alignment with the Alliance’s EAD Best Practices.
- We take a conservative approach to upgrades and value stability of product over early adoption. We upgrade to new versions of AS, generally all at once, only after we are confident that the release is stable according to the ArchivesSpace community..
- If you use Alliance hosting, staff have access to your instance. This is a great advantage for training and troubleshooting. We will not abuse our access: we will only modify your data with prior communication and permission.
Costs
General support for archival collection management and the costs of implementation are included in the Archives & Manuscripts Collections Service fees.
Hosting
The Alliance has arranged hosting for ArchivesSpace with LibraryHost. Hosting is available for an additional cost; pricing depends on hosting and migration needs and includes contract administration and oversight.
If institutions elect to host AS themselves, but are participants in the Archives & Manuscripts Collections Service, they still have full access to all AS documentation and training.