Meeting minutes 2020-01-15 · Archivematica Product Support Program

15 January 2020 3:30 p.m. UTC (time zone calculator)

Attendees

Artefactual: Sara Allain, Sarah Romkey, Justin Simpson, Jesús Garcia Crespo
Bodleian: Susan Thomas, Matthew Neely, James Mooney, Wendy Maule
International Institute of Social History: Eric de Ruijter, Robert Gillesse
Max Communications: Geoff Blissitt, Tim Schofield
Picturae: Wim van Dongen
Wellcome Collection: Tom Scott, Jonathan Tweed

Regrets: none

Agenda

3:30 UTC - Meeting starts

3:35 UTC - Terms of Reference review (Sara Allain)

4:00 UTC - Roadmap sharing (Sarah Romkey)

4:45 UTC - Discussion of Archivematica core vs. extensions (Sarah Romkey)

5:15 UTC - “Off-schedule” presentations (Sarah Romkey)

5:25 UTC - Meeting wrap-up

Notes

Terms of Reference review

Led by: Sara Allain
Participants collaboratively reviewed the draft terms of reference prepared by Artefactual
Notes made on the TOR internal draft document
When complete, TOR will be published at https://psp.archivematica.org/

Roadmap sharing

Led by: Sarah Romkey

Artefactual

Use a public Trello board called Archivematica Roadmap for organizing high-level work - epic-level descriptions of features or sets of features (i.e. Preservation Action Registry)
Discrete issues are filed in the Archivematica Issues repository
“Scheduled-1.x” column in Trello has cards for features that will be in the next release
Internally Artfactual uses Codetree, which is a kanban-style list of all of issues across all Archivematica repositories (all information in Codetree is also available in GitHub, but not organized in kanban-style boards)

Bodleian

Prepared some slides (private) - based on experience with Archivematica proof of concept project that they did in 2019
Highlighted gaps - performance, error reporting, metadata, user access/permissions
Performance and metadata are their two highest priorities
Don’t have developer on board yet so haven’t sorted out tooling around this work but expect to do so in the near future

International Institute of Social History

List (private) is not really a roadmap, more of a wishlist
Largely about performance and integration with other systems
Want to ingest bigger collections than they can now
Dataverse and ArchivesSpace integrations are high priority - hoping that they can use as-is
Pre- and post-ingest workflows - trying to automate as much as possible
Office docs and email normalization - lower priority but still important, and not yet solved by the community
Very interested in reporting as well - specifically knowing what has been processed/preserved

Max Communications

List of suggested requirements that is coming out of their six-month plan (private for now, expect to have public roadmap soon)
Will be doing several client demos over the next few weeks so expect to get more customer feedback to add to the list soon
Interested in more of an integrated development approach - better AIP management so that customers aren’t immediately creating spreadsheets to track things
- E.g. some notion of “projects” inside Archivematica
Batch creation of AIPs (also deleting of AIPs)
Better reporting
Also specific client requests like time-limited viewing portals

Picturae

Wishlist (private) - gathered from experience at camp and also discussions with City of Amsterdam and other clients; lots of overlap between other
Also some “Dutch specialities” - Picturae developing workflows that are specific to the Dutch archival community; might not be universally applicable but the process of writing that code could present helpful lessons (i.e. how to write custom code that is easy to migrate along with AM versions)

Wellcome

Roadmap (private) focuses on born digital workflow
Struggling to get AM working containerized on AWS - this is a high priority
Want to ensure that all development is aligned with core Archivematica development
Thinking through a step change in the UX of the Archivematica dashboard - i.e. error messages, responsiveness; also specific areas like the appraisal tab
Decreased coupling and independent service scaling - right now it’s hard to run AM containerized, makes it difficult to improve performance
Also looking at new features like integration with Sharepoint, email appraisal

Comments

Sarah will collate the above responses into broad feature categories
Nice to see a lot of common ground between institutional priorities

Discussion of Archivematica core vs. extensions

Led by: Sarah Romkey
Wellcome document - core is the workflow engine that describes and stores content
IISH document - the “sausage factory” - is an AIP-producing thing via workflow manager. Considering how “lean” Archivematica should be - what should happen inside Archivematica and what should happen outside (e.g. de-duplication - should it happen outside as a pre-ingest workflow?)
Format migration - how to track files by format and migrate them to new best practice formats over time
Justin: interested in looking at storage management as a potential
Tom: this is an area where Artefactual should be a benevolent dictator - not going to be helpful if we try to satisfy everybody
Including things like supported deployment environments,
Justin, Sarah, Jesús will collate these ideas - more feedback welcome via email
Wim notes that the IISH and Wellcome documents covered all of his thoughts
Tom: suggests that Archivematica core should be defined very leanly/concisely, with extensions written much more broadly so that they can be used in a wide variety of ways
Wim: basic point that has to be reiterated a lot to customers is what’s in scope and what’s out of scope

“Off-schedule” presentations

Led by: Sarah Romkey
Enduro - February/March; presentation by Artefactual staff on background and future plans for this new prototype automation tool
- Sara to schedule demo/discussion
- Will be recorded for those who can’t make it
Others?
- Reporting - how Grafana/Prometheus is being used - Wendy and James could present on what the Bodleian has done in their microservices project (after April); Artefactual could contribute some content too

Meeting wrap-up

Next meeting - April 22, 2020 at 3:00 p.m. UTC
Agenda items for next meeting:
- Sarah, Justin, Jesús to present “Archivematica core” definition (major agenda item)
- October meeting location