Using ArchivesSpace to Support Research Data Curation

Abstract

ArchivesSpace is a community and an application. The community has over 100 members, ranging from very large organizations, such as NYU and the University of California, San Diego, to the very small, such as the Rockerfeller Archive Center and The Michael Feinstein Great American Songbook Initiative. ArchivesSpace, the application, has much to offer to management of research data. An open-source, standards based application publicly released in September 2013, ArchivesSpace has the potential to occupy several points in the research data workflow: accessioning, arrangement and description, rights management, and access. The presentation will show how, by using ArchivesSpace, curators can build and publish dynamic datasets of both born-digital and analog archival resources, which will allow researchers new points of access and discovery. An example we will overview is how ArchivesSpace enables curators to build an EAD representation of a research data project that can also be utilized as a data paper online. The presentation will conclude with a brief over of the ArchivesSpace community, noting its component parts, its membership, and its contributions to the development and sustainability of the Archivesspace application.