ArchivesSpace 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.

Background

We store digital descriptions of our archival collections in the following places:

Workflow

• 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:

  • Our EAD export app in Heroku (see EAD export app ) retrieves public EAD files from ArchivesSpace’s API and posts them to the Science History Institute EAD bucket

  • 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.

  • Example https://www.chstm.org/collections/search?text=Carbogel

OBSOLETE – Technical details about the server

This section should be removed later in 2022.

ArchivesSpace lives on an AWS S3 server ArchivesSpace-prod, at https://50.16.132.240/ (also found at https://archives.sciencehistory.org)

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.

SSL is based on the following: http://www.rubydoc.info/github/archivesspace/archivesspace

The executables are at /opt/archivesspace/

The configuration file is /opt/archivesspace/config/config.rb
Logs are at: logs/archivesspace.out

Apache server is at /var/log/apache2/

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 user ubuntu)

• There may be a short delay as the server re-indexes data.

OBSOLETE –Restarting the server to fix Tomcat memory leak

We restart the ArchivesSpace program (not the server) using a cronjob that runs /opt/archivesspace/archivesspace.sh restart every night at 2 am. This prevents a chronic memory leak from eating up all the CPU credits for the machine.

When the server is restarted, Jetty creates a set of temporary files in /tmp

that look like this:

hsperfdata_ubuntu
jetty-0.0.0.0-8089-backend.war-_-any-3200460420275417425
jetty-0.0.0.0-8090-solr.war--any-_1669707332158985985
jetty-0.0.0.0-8091-indexer.war-_aspace-indexer-any-3026688914663148716
jetty-0.0.0.0-8080-frontend.war--any-3028692540497613460
jetty-0.0.0.0-8081-public.war--any-268053434795494538
jetty-0.0.0.0-8082-oai.war--any-_243630232179303838

Only the most recent set are used by Jetty, but the old ones accumulate rapidly if the server is restarted nightly.

A cron job removes obsolete ones nightly.

Export

The ArchivesSpace EADs are harvested by:

Both institutions harvest the EADs at http://ead.sciencehistory.org/.

OBSOLETE – Backups

These consist of making backups of the sql database used by the ArchivesSpace program.

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.

Documentation

https://archivesspace.atlassian.net/wiki/home contains comprehensive documentation.

If you have a sciencehistory.orgaddress, you can get access to it by filling out a form.