Probably my last UK AtoM user group meeting

This week the 3rd UK AtoM users group meeting was held at the Honourable Artillery Company (HAC) in London. A packed and interesting programme had been put together by Justine Taylor and it was great to see how well attended it was. Indeed a room change was required to accommodate the number of people who wanted to attend.

Elizabeth Wells from Westminster School Archives started off the presentations by talking about how she is using AtoM to catalogue objects and artefacts. Several of us in the room have items in their care that are not archives, but I think Westminster School were the only archive to be looking after a 92 year old pancake! Being able to catalogue such items in AtoM is a high priority for many AtoM users given that they don’t want to manage multiple systems.

It is really interesting to hear how different institutions use AtoM and in particular the workarounds they use to resolve specific problems. Elizabeth talked us through the processes she has put in place for storing additional information about objects (such as valuations) that she doesn’t want to make available to the wider public. She mentioned how useful a previous UK AtoM meeting was in highlighting the fact that information within an archival description that is hidden from view within the AtoM interface will still be available to users if they download the EAD. This was a concern so she is using the accessions module of AtoM to store information that is confidential.

She also mentioned that she was using the RAD template for describing the objects in her collections. These can sit within an ISAD(G) hierarchy, but the RAD standard gives more flexibility to record different types of items. I had not realised that AtoM allowed you to chop and change between the templates in this way so this was really interesting to hear.

Victoria Peters from Strathclyde University talked to us about their work to link AtoM with their Library Catalogue interface Primo (SUPrimo - the best name ever for a Primo library catalogue!). Following on from York’s own work in this area, they enabled top level records from AtoM to be harvested into Primo and this allows staff and students to more easily discover things that are available in the archives.

They have also been thinking about how to best surface special collections. Special collections are catalogued at item level within the library catalogue but there is no overarching record describing each of the collections (for example who collected the material and why), and no obvious way to enter this information into the library catalogue, which doesn't support hierarchical descriptions. Information about special collections isn't discoverable from AtoM and there is no way to cross link with information that is held by the archives even though there are obvious links between material held in the archives and special collections.

The solution they have come up with is to add a description of each of the special collections into AtoM. This allows links to be made between related archives and special collections and will really help those users who are browsing the archives catalogue to see which special collections they may also be interested in. The description within AtoM then links back to the individual items within SUPrimo for more detailed item level information.

Victoria summed this work up by saying that it isn’t perfect but was a pretty quick and effective way of solving a problem. As a consequence, both archives and special collections are more discoverable and the links between them are clearer. Users do not need to know whether they should go to the library catalogue or the archives catalogue as both archives and special collections are signposted from both systems.

I then updated the group on work to enable EAD harvesting in AtoM. I have previously blogged about phase 1 of the project and wanted to talk about more recent testing since we have upgraded to AtoM 2.4 and future plans to make the harvesting functionality better. This may be the subject of a future blog post….if I have time!

Caroline Catchpole from The National Archives followed on from my presentation to tell us about Discovery and their future plans. The ability to harvest EAD from systems like AtoM is still very much on their wishlist but the development resource is not currently available. She has however extracted some EAD from various AtoM sites in the UK so that she can explore how easy it would be to incorporate it into Discovery. She talked through some of the problems with the “unwieldy beast” that is EAD and how different implementations and lack of consistency can cause problems for aggregators.

After lunch Justine Taylor our host talked us through how she is using the Function entity in AtoM. She has been experimenting with AtoM’s functions as a way to create a useful company structure to hold information about what key activities HAC carries out. This will be another useful way for users to browse the catalogue and find information that is of interest to them.

Lucy Shepherd from Imperial College gave us a brief overview of preparatory work around establishing AtoM and Archivematica. They have not yet got this up and running but she is thinking about how it will be used and what deposit workflows will be put in place. She sees the AtoM community as a key selling point, but mentioned that were potential challenges around finding the time to complete this exploratory work and what systems their IT department would support.

Matthew Addis from Arkivum gave us a nice demo of the integration between AtoM and Archivematica and talked through an issue around how the two systems share metadata (or not as the case may be). He has been investigating this because Arkivum's Perpetua service includes both AtoM and Archivematica and a good integration between the two products is something that is required by their customers. He described the use case where clients have digital objects and metadata to add in batches. They want automated preservation using Archivematica, the master copy protected in long term storage and an access version accessible in AtoM with rich and hierarchical metadata to give context and enable search and retrieval.

AtoM supports bulk imports and hierarchical description, but when digital objects are passed through Archivematica, the metadata within the Dissemination Information Package (DIP) is flattened - only Dublin Core metadata is passed to AtoM through the DIP. Archivematica however, will accept various types of metadata and will store them in its Archival Information Package (AIP). This is a potential problem because valuable metadata that is stored in Archivematica will not be associated with the dissemination copy in AtoM unless it is Dublin Core.

Matthew demonstrated a workaround he has been using to get the right level of metadata into AtoM. After digital objects have been transferred from Archivematica to AtoM at the right point in an existing hierarchy, he then imported additional metadata directly into AtoM using the CSV import to enhance the basic Dublin Core metadata that has come through AtoM. He suggested that configuring AtoM with the slugs generated from the identifier field makes this process easier to automate. He is still thinking about this issue, and in particular whether the AIP in Archivematica could be enhanced by metadata from AtoM.

Geoff Browell from King's College London talked to us about an ambitious project to create an AtoM catalogue for the whole of Africa. The Archives Africa project has been working with The National Archives of Madagascar and exploring a lightweight way of getting local descriptions into an AtoM instance hosted in the UK using spreadsheets and email.

Lastly, we had an update from Dan Gillean from Artefactual Systems which included some news about initial technical planning for AtoM 3 and an update on the AtoM Foundation. The Foundation has been set up to oversee and support the development, sustainability and adoption of AtoM, specifically in relation to AtoM 3. Dan talked about the benefits in moving the governance of AtoM outside of Artefactual Systems and establishing a more diverse ecosystem. The Foundation will be collecting information from AtoM users about the functionality that is required in AtoM 3 at some point in the future. Dan also revealed that AtoM version 2.4.1 should be with us very soon and that the next UK AtoM Camp will be held at the University of Westminster in July 2019.

I anticipate this will be my last UK AtoM user group meeting given that I am moving on to pastures new next month. It has been really encouraging to see how much the user community in the UK has grown since my first involvement in AtoM back in 2014 and it is great to see the active knowledge sharing and collaboration in the UK user group. Long may it continue!



This post was written by Jenny Mitcham, Digital Archivist

The 2nd UK AtoM user group meeting

I was pleased to be able to host the second meeting of the UK AtoM user group here in York at the end of last week. AtoM (or Access to Memory) is the Archival Management System that we use here at the Borthwick Institute and it seems to be increasing in popularity across the UK.

We had 18 attendees from across England, Scotland and Wales representing both archives and service providers. It was great to see several new faces and meet people at different stages of their AtoM implementation.

We started off with introductions and everyone had the chance to mention one recent AtoM triumph and one current problem or challenge. A good way to start the conversation and perhaps a way of considering future development opportunities and topics for future meetings.

Here is a selection of the successes that were mentioned:

• Establishing a search facility that searches across two AtoM instances
• Getting senior management to agree to establishing AtoM
• Getting AtoM up and running
• Finally having an online catalogue
• Working with authority records in AtoM
• Working with other contributors and getting their records displaying on AtoM
• Using the API to drive another website
• Upgrading to version 2.4
• Importing legacy EAD into AtoM
• Uploading finding aids into AtoM 2.4
• Adding 1000+ urls to digital resources into AtoM using a set of SQL update statements

...and here are some of the current challenges or problems users are trying to solve:

• How to bar code boxes - can this be linked to AtoM?
• Moving from CALM to AtoM
• Not being able to see the record you want to link to when trying to select related records
• Using the API to move things into an online showcase
• Advocacy for taking the open source approach
• Working out where to start and how best to use AtoM
• Sharing data with the Archives Hub
• How to record objects alongside archives
• Issues with harvesting EAD via OAI-PMH
• Building up the right level of expertise to be able to contribute code back to AtoM
• Working out what to do when AtoM stops working
• Discovering that AtoM doesn't enforce uniqueness in identifiers for archival descriptions

After some discussion about some of the issues that had been raised, Louise Hughes from the University of Gloucestershire showed us her catalogue and talked us through some of the decisions they had made as they set this up. 

The University of Gloucestershire's AtoM instance

She praised the digital object functionality and has been using this to add images and audio to the archival descriptions. She was also really happy with the authority records, in particular, being able to view a person and easily see which archives relate to them. She discussed ongoing work to enable records from AtoM to be picked up and displayed within the library catalogue. She hasn't yet started to use AtoM for accessioning but hopes to do so in the future. Adopting all the functionality available within AtoM needs time and thought and tackling it one step at a time (particularly if you are a lone archivist) makes a lot of sense.

Tracy Deakin from St John's College, Cambridge talked us through some recent work to establish a shared search page for their two institutional AtoM instances. One holds the catalogue of the college archives and the other is for the Special Collections Library. They had taken the decision to implement two separate instances of AtoM as they required separate front pages and the ability to manage the editing rights separately. However, as some researchers will find it helpful to search across both instances a search page has been developed that accesses the Elasticsearch index of each site in order to cross search.

The interface for a shared search across St John's College AtoM sites

Vicky Phillips from the National Library of Wales talked us through their processes for upgrading their AtoM instance to version 2.4 and discussed some of the benefits of moving to 2.4. They are really happy to have the full width treeview and the drag and drop functionality within it.

The upgrade has not been without it's challenges though. They have had to sort out some issues with invalid slugs, ongoing issues due to the size of some of their archives (they think the XML caching functionality will help with this) and sometimes find that MySQL gets overwhelmed with the number of queries and needs a restart. They still have some testing to do around bilingual finding aids and have also been working on testing out the new functionality around OAI PMH harvesting of EAD.

Following on from this I gave a presentation on upgrading AtoM to 2.4 at the Borthwick Institute. We are not quite there yet but I talked about the upgrade plan and process and some decisions we have made along the way. I won't say any more for the time being as I think this will be the subject of a future blog post.

Before lunch my colleague Charles Fonge introduced VIAF (Virtual International Authority File) to the group. This initiative will enable Authority Records created by different organisations across the world to be linked together more effectively. Several institutions may create an authority record about the same individual and currently it is difficult to allow these to be linked together when data is aggregated by services such as The Archives Hub. It is worth thinking about how we might use VIAF in an AtoM context. At the moment there is no place to store a VIAF ID in AtoM and it was agreed this would be a useful development for the future.

After lunch Justine Taylor from the Honourable Artillery Company introduced us to the topic of back up and disaster recovery of AtoM. She gave the group some useful food for thought, covering techniques and the types of data that would need to be included (hint: it's not solely about the database). This was particularly useful for those working in small institutions who don't have an IT department that just does all this for them as a matter of course. Some useful and relevant information on this subject can be found in the AtoM documentation.

Max Communications are a company who provide services around AtoM. They talked through some of their work with institutions and what services they can offer.  As well as being able to provide hosting and support for AtoM in the UK, they can also help with data migration from other archival management systems (such as CALM). They demonstrated their crosswalker tool that allows archivists to map structured data to ISAD(G) before import to AtoM.

They showed us an AtoM theme they had developed to allow Vimeo videos to be embedded and accessible to users. Although AtoM does have support for video, the files can be very large in size and there are large overheads involved in running a video server if substantial quantities are involved. Keeping the video outside of AtoM and managing the permissions through Vimeo provided a good solution for one of their clients.

They also demonstrated an AtoM plugin they had developed for Wordpress. Though they are big fans of AtoM, they pointed out that it is not the best platform for creating interesting narratives around archives. They were keen to be able to create stories about archives by pulling in data from AtoM where appropriate.

At the end of the meeting Dan Gillean from Artefactual Systems updated us (via Skype) about the latest AtoM developments. It was really interesting to hear about the new features that will be in version 2.5. Note, that none of this is ever a secret - Artefactual make their road map and release notes publicly available on their wiki - however it is still helpful to hear it enthusiastically described.

The group was really pleased to hear about the forthcoming audit logging feature, the clever new functionality around calculating creation dates, and the ability for users to save their clipboard across sessions (and share them with the searchroom when they want to access the items). Thanks to those organisations that are funding this exciting new functionality. Also worth a mention is the slightly less sexy, but very valuable work that Artefactual is doing behind the scenes to upgrade Elasticsearch.

Another very useful meeting and my thanks go to all who contributed. It is certainly encouraging to see the thriving and collaborative AtoM community we have here in the UK.

Our next meeting will be in London in the autumn.

Jenny Mitcham, Digital Archivist

The first UK AtoM user group meeting

Yesterday the newly formed UK AtoM user group met for the first time at St John's College Cambridge and I was really pleased that myself and a colleague were able to attend.

Bridge of Sighs in Autumn (photo by Sally-Anne Shearn)

This group has been established to provide the growing UK AtoM community with a much needed forum for exchanging ideas and sharing experiences of using AtoM.

The meeting was attended by about 15 people though we were informed that there are nearly 50 people on the email distribution list. Interest in AtoM is certainly increasing in the UK.

As this was our first meeting, those who had made progress with AtoM were encouraged to give a brief presentation covering the following points:

1. Where are you with AtoM (investigating, testing, using)?
2. What do you use it for? (cataloguing, accessions, physical storage locations)
3. What do you like about it/ what works?
4. What don’t you like about it/ what doesn’t work?
5. How do you see AtoM fitting into your wider technical infrastructure? (do you have separate location or accession databases etc?)
6. What unanswered questions do you have?

It was really interesting to find out how others are using AtoM in the UK. A couple of attendees had already upgraded to the new 2.4 release so that was encouraging to see.

I'm not going to summarise the whole meeting but I made a note of people's likes and dislikes (questions 3 and 4 above). There were some common themes that came up.

Note that most users are still using AtoM 2.2 or 2.3, those who have moved to 2.4 haven't had much chance to explore it yet. It may be that some of these comments are already out of date and fixed in the new release.

What works?

AtoM seems to have lots going for it!

The words 'intuitive', 'user friendly', 'simple', 'clear' and 'flexible' were mentioned several times. One attendee described some user testing she carried out during which she found her users just getting on and using it without any introduction or explanation! Clearly a good sign!

The fact that it was standards compliant was mentioned as well as the fact that consistency was enforced. When moving from unstructured finding aids to AtoM it really does help ensure that the right bits of information are included. The fact that AtoM highlights which mandatory fields are missing at the top of a page is really helpful when checking through your own or others records.

The ability to display digital images was highlighted by others as a key selling point, particularly the browse by digital objects feature.

The way that different bits of the AtoM database interlink was a plus point that was mentioned more than once - this allows you to build up complex interconnecting records using archival descriptions and authority records and these can also be linked to accession records and a physical location.

The locations section of AtoM was thought to be 'a good thing' - for recording information about where in the building each archive is stored. This works well once you get your head around how best to use it.

Integration with Archivematica was mentioned by one user as being a key selling point for them - several people in the room were either using, or thinking of using Archivematica for digital preservation.

The user community itself and the quick and helpful responses to queries posted on the user forum were mentioned by more than one attendee. Also praised was the fact that AtoM is in continuous active development and very much moving in the right direction.

What doesn't work?

Several attendees mentioned the digital object functionality in AtoM. As well as being a clear selling point, it was also highlighted as an area that could be improved. The one-to-one relationship between an archival description and a digital object wasn't thought to be ideal and there was some discussion about linking through to external repositories - it would be nice if items linked in this way could be displayed in the AtoM image carousel even where the url doesn't end in a filename.

The typeahead search suggestions when you enter search terms were not thought to be helpful all of the time. Sometimes the closest matches do not appear in the list of suggested results.

One user mentioned that they would like a publication status that is somewhere in between draft and published. This would be useful for those records that are complete and can be viewed internally by a selected group of users who are logged in but are not available to the wider public.

More than one person mentioned that they would like to see a conservation module in AtoM.

There was some discussion about the lack of an audit trail for descriptions within AtoM. It isn't possible to see who created a record, when it was created and information about updates. This would be really useful for data quality checking, particularly when training new members of staff and volunteers.

Some concerns about scalability were mentioned - particularly for one user with a very large number of records within AtoM - the process of re-indexing AtoM can take three days.

When creating creator or access points, the drop down menu doesn’t display all the options so this causes difficulties when trying to link to the right point or establishing whether the desired record is in the system or not. This can be particularly problematic for common surnames as several different records may exist.

There are some issues with the way authority records are created currently, with no automated way of creating a unique identifier and no ability to keep authority records in draft.

A comment about the lack of auto-save and the issue of the web form timing out and losing all of your work seemed to be a shared concern for many attendees.

Other things that were mentioned included an integration with Active Directory and local workarounds that had to be put in place to make finding aids bi-lingual.

Moving forward

The group agreed that it would be useful to keep a running list of these potential areas of development for AtoM and that perhaps in the future members may be able to collaborate to jointly sponsor work to improve AtoM. This would be a really positive outcome for this new network.

I was also able to present on a recent collaboration to enable OAI-PMH harvesting of EAD from AtoM and use it as an opportunity to try to drum up support for further development of this new feature. I had to try and remember what OAI-PMH stood for and think I got 83% of it right!

Thanks to St John's College Cambridge for hosting. I look forward to our next meeting which we hope to hold here in York in the Spring.

Jenny Mitcham, Digital Archivist