ADMS at University of Kentucky

I spoke with Megan Mummey, former Briscoe Archives Assistant and current Collections Management Archivist at the University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center.

Here is what she had to say about using ArchivesSpace:

I came to UK’s Special Collections Research Center in late 2010. They began implementing Archivist’s Toolkit in 2009. I had various project positions that involved the ingest of records into AT, until I was hired as the Collections Management Archivist in 2012. UK is also a charter member of ArchivesSpace. AT is no longer supported in any way and with every Java update AT breaks a little bit more, so ArchivesSpace was really our only option moving forward. We haven’t implemented ArchivesSpace yet, because they’ve had various problems with the migration tool from AT. We’ve been waiting on further refinements of the tool. I’m the person in charge of the migration, and we’re planning on pulling the plug and going live with ArchivesSpace in July 2015.

UK isn’t a “small” operation, but it isn’t robust with staff. I’m the only processing archivist we have. I’d say during AT implementation there was one professional staff member and one project person working on implementation. 6 years later and we’re still not fully implemented at all.  A lot of the work I do on my own (not supervising students or staff) is plugging away at legacy finding aids. Our situation was a little complicated by the fact that prior to my predecessor coming here very little was accessioned and very little was fully processed. We have a 60,000 cubic foot+ collection that was not well managed for 30 years...We’re still catching up. The backlog is intense.

I would say that if you could get things outsourced into EAD that would be the way to go. If you don’t you could run the risk of the project being abandoned, slowing down, or just never getting finished. That’s kind of the boat I’m in right now.

We are currently paying the whole membership for ArchivesSpace... we had support installing it, support for the migration, we have a voice on the listserv for our concerns. The SCRC is a part of the greater UK Libraries so we had access to a programmer and server space for ArchivesSpace and AT already. As far as training, we’re having an ArchivesSpace workshop here at the end of March and I know that they held a similar AT workshop in 2009. We developed our own training documentation for AT, but I don’t foresee it being a big hurdle for ArchivesSpace since it will be familiar to most staff. If you pay the membership you also get access to ArchivesSpace’s help documentation which can be useful, and they are working to beef it up. So this time my task force and I (the digital archivist and director of archives) won’t have to recreate our previous training documentation.

If you have any more specific questions, I’d be happy to answer them. You can feel free to call my office line too. I can say that we wouldn’t be able to live without a Content Management System now. It makes searching, locations, encoding, and MARC so much easier.