announcing ArchivesSpace's new Standards and Testing Archivist
Christine Di Bella
Dear ArchivesSpace members,
I am happy to announce that Martha Tenney will soon be joining ArchivesSpace in the new position of Standards and Testing Archivist.
Martha has been active in archives and open-source communities for over a decade. Since 2013, she has been at Barnard College’s Archives and Special Collections. In roles including Director and Digital Archivist, Martha has been responsible for all facets of running a busy archives and implementing the software applications it needs. She first implemented Archivists’ Toolkit, then ArchivesSpace, for Barnard’s finding aids, as well as the mechanisms to contribute them to Columbia University’s finding aids platform, which now uses ArcLight. She also led the creation of Barnard’s digital collections platform using Islandora and coordinated its later migration to Archipelago. She has been particularly involved in the Islandora and Archipelago communities, with an eye toward ensuring the software meets the needs of smaller academic institutions. Testing and metadata management have been key to her roles, both for Barnard’s local systems and in making the systems large communities use for their collections better.
Beyond her work at Barnard College, Martha has also been instrumental in the Prison Library Support Network reference project, an all-volunteer effort to respond to requests for research assistance from incarcerated individuals. Martha has also been an Adjunct Professor in the Archives and Public History Master’s Program at New York University, where she taught a course on archival description and management, helping aspiring archivists engage with descriptive standards and understand their significance for making archives accessible and connecting across professions and communities. Martha has an M.S. in Information Science from the University of Texas at Austin and a B.A. in Sociology from Wesleyan University.
As ArchivesSpace’s Standards and Testing Archivist, Martha will work closely with the Metadata Standards and Testing sub-teams to support their activities. She will help us all keep a close eye on the dynamic standards landscape and work on standards-related projects to ensure that the ArchivesSpace application meets the needs of our current and future community. One of her first projects in this area will be to develop an official ArchivesSpace to ISAD(g) crosswalk and a set of tooltips to match for use by institutions who use this as their content standard. Martha will also work toward improving our mechanisms for manual and automated testing, as well as increasing the level of testing coverage for the application overall.
We are very thankful that our strong member support enables us to grow our team in this way. We are also appreciative to Lyrasis for support through its Community Supported Technology (CST) Growth Fund. This fund is a new initiative to help the communities for which it serves as Organizational Home address strategic priorities.
Martha will officially join the ArchivesSpace team on November 3. Please join us in welcoming her to this new role in the ArchivesSpace community!
Christine
Christine Di Bella
ArchivesSpace Senior Program Manager
