ArchivesSpace (or ASpace for short) is a server whose main purpose is to host a software program also named… ArchivesSpace. The program is “an open source archives information management application for managing and providing web access to archives, manuscripts and digital objects”. In August 2022 we switched from hosting our own ASpace server on EC2 to a third-party-hosted instance at LibraryHost.
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Finding aids are first written up as Word documents at
Shared/P/Othmer Library/Archives/Collections Inventories/Archival Finding Aids and Box Lists.Kent enters the data into ArchivesSpace. They finding aids are revised in the process.
Once they are in ArchivesSpace:
They are automatically exported by https://github.com/sciencehistory/export_archivesspace_xml to EAD files at http://ead.sciencehistory.org/
Kent also exports them to a PDF, which he then sends to Caroline. These are entered into the OPAC. (see e.g. https://othmerlib.sciencehistory.org/articles/1065801.15134/1.PDF )
Note: the PDF has to be manually updated in the OPAC every time the metadata in ArchivesSpace changes.
The OPAC also points to a PUI URL at https://archives.sciencehistory.org/ .
Certain works in the Digital Collections also point to the PUI. Example: https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/81jkowj.
Finally, the exported EAD files are also ingested by University of Penn Libraries Special Collections and the Center for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (CHSTM).
Penn, in turn, processes these EAD files on a nightly basis and adds them to the Philadelphia Area Archives search portal, a service funded by PACSCL.
Likewise, CHSTM ingests these EADs and makes them searchable at its search portal.
OBSOLETE – Technical details about the server
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The current production version of Aspace is 3.0.1 .
Terminal access: ssh -i /path/to/production/pem_file.pem ubuntu@50.16.132.240
The ubuntu user owns all the admin scripts.
The relevant Ansible role is: /roles/archivesspace/ in the ansible-inventory codebase.
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Configuration for the Apache site is at /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf.
OBSOLETE – Startup
To start Archivesspace:
/opt/archivesspace/archivesspace.sh start(as userubuntu)
There may be a short delay as the server re-indexes data.
OBSOLETE –Restarting the server to fix Tomcat memory leak
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Both institutions harvest the EADs by automatically scrapinghttp://ead.sciencehistory.org/.
OBSOLETE – Building the server
The server not yet fully ansible-ized.
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The build doesn’t copy the scripts in /home/ubuntu over correctly. Passwords for the scripts also need to be provided.
All these directories under /var/www/html/ are also missing: css; ead; font-awesome-4.7.0; fonts; img; js.
The ubuntu user needs to be added to the www-data group
SSH keys are not loaded into /etc/ssl/private/
The archivesspace server is not actually started (sudo systemctl start archivesspace).
OBSOLETE – Backups
These consist of making backups of the sql database used by the ArchivesSpace program.
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See Backups and Recovery (Historical notes) for a discussion of how the chf-hydra-backup s3 bucket is then copied to Dubnium and in-house storage.
OBSOLETE – Restoring from backup
You can get a recent backup of the database at https://s3.console.aws.amazon.com/s3/object/chf-hydra-backup/Aspace/aspace-backup.sql
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