Connecting Metadata and Digital Assets: ArchivesSpace and Preservica

Session Description: Bringing together a metadata management system like ArchivesSpace and a digital asset management system like Preservica so that they can communicate with each other can be a complicated process. This presentation will discuss how the University of Rochester developed their workflow to create digital objects within ArchivesSpace efficiently at scale, as well as provide access to the digital surrogates or born digital assets that researchers want to have access to. This process utilizes the catalog sync option that Preservica developed, and specifically discusses how to create SIPs suitable for ingest into Preservica, after which they are synced with ArchivesSpace. These SIPs are difficult to create manually but can be generated more easily with programmatic intervention like Python scripting. This workflow was ultimately unlocked by using the Digitization Work Order Plugin developed by New York University Libraries to pull out the necessary data from ArchivesSpace to satisfy all the needs of the Preservica catalog sync. Ultimately this allows for the import of digital assets into Preservica in such a way that the metadata held in ArchivesSpace could be pulled over to Preservica (and then kept in sync over time) as well as populate ArchivesSpace with digital objects associated with each relevant archival object. These Python scripts were then also turned into a small graphical utility, opening the possibility of leveraging these workflows without having to work in the command line, and instead just being able to press a few buttons to generate SIPs that satisfy both platform’s needs.Presented virtually at the ArchivesSpace Virtual Member Forum on March 27, 2024 from 2:05 to 2:35 PM Eastern Time.PowerPoint presentation is of a very large file size due to embedded video providing demo for software described in session.