In the beginning...
pre-2015: Individual collecting repositories (Amistad, Louisiana Research Collection (LaRC), LAL, and Newcomb (then Vorhoff)) chose, administered, and managed their own databases for archival holdings. LaRC, LAL, and Amistad managed their own instances of Archon. Newcomb Archives employed Archivist Toolkit.
Spring 2015 - Spring 2016: A request by LaRC initiated discussion surrounding the idea that Library IT manage a single instance of a database that could serve all library-related archival repositories. ArchivesSpace was the chosen option because it is a system born from both Archon and Archivist Toolkit, and was cost-effective. Library IT worked with a newly formed committee comprised of librarians and staff people chosen by Library Department heads in addition to representatives from Amistad and Vorhoff. The charge of the ArchivesSpace Committee was to manage the migration of archival records from the databases of participating repositories into a single instance of ArchivesSpace. Ultimately, only three repositories opted to have their finding aids and administrative records migrated into ArchivesSpace: LaRC, LAL, and Newcomb Archives. Over the course of a year's time, the ArchivesSpace Committee members cleaned up migrated data, tested the system, identified issues to report to the ArchivesSpace development team. A plan to customization to the public interface was also developed. The Committee also opted to organize and host a training workshop led by ArchivesSpace representatives open to regional member institutions as well as Tulane.
January 2016: Howard-Tilton Memorial Library hosted a regional ArchivesSpace training workshop where librarians, staff, and archivists from Tulane Libraries, Amistad, and other participating regional member institutions (LSU and Nicholls State, among others) attended.
2016-2018: Participating repositories continued to clean up data post-migration in anticipation of upcoming version updates for improved functionality of the public interface, reporting tools, and container coding. Unfortunately, with an untimely delay in regaining Library IT support, the Tulane instance of ArchivesSpace remained in stasis, further postponing work needed to make the database suitable for a full debut to library personnel and the larger Tulane community. It was also during this time that the old Archon databases maintained by LaRC and LAL were shut down from public use and a quiet switch over to the Tulane administrated ArchivesSpace database was completed.
2018-2019: After almost two years of stasis, Tulane Libraries made two important decisions regarding ArchivesSpace. First, a re-organization of Tulane University Special Collections (TUSC) led to a reduction in the number of individuals on the ArchivesSpace Committee. TUSC (which encompassed LaRC, Southeast Architectural Archives, Hogan Archives, and University Archives) would be represented by one person; Newcomb Archives would be represented by one person; and the LAL would continue with its sole representative. Second, Tulane Libraries elected to have its instance of ArchivesSpace hosted by Lyrasis. Migration to Lyrasis, testing, continued data cleanup, and interface customizations were completed in early 2019. In late 2019, the former instance of ArchivesSpace was turned off and the library website pages were connected to the current Lyrasis administrated instance. The Committee organized a presentation for the Library's Professional Development series to begin the introduction of the database to Tulane Libraries personnel.
2020-present: At the beginning of 2020, the ArchivesSpace Committee began work with Library IT to prepare for the harvest of records from ArchivesSpace by the library's discovery tool, ExLibris's Primo. Full completion and implementation of this particular project was delayed by the Covid19 crisis and the scheduled transition of the main library's catalog system from Voyager to Alma in 2021. By early 2022, the integration was in progress allowing for published finding aids from participating repositories in Tulane's instance of ArchivesSpace to be accessed via Primo/Library Search in addition to the public browser interface of ArchivesSpace.
