ArchivesSpace Governance Board update - May 2025
Mitchell, Erik
Dear ArchivesSpace members:
As the Chair of the ArchivesSpace Governance Board, I am writing to report on the group’s 4thQuarter meeting, which was held virtually on May 1.
We got a brief update on operations activities, including the preparations for membership renewals and some recent discussions with representatives of a variety of interesting community development projects. We also learned about the activities of the Technical Advisory Council and User Advisory Council and the status of nominations for the next term.
Matthew Neely of the University of Oxford was announced as the incoming Vice Chair of the Governance Board. He will support our incoming Chair, Maggie Hughes of The Getty Research Institute, during FY2025-2026. Matthew will serve as Chair in FY2026-2027. I’d like to extend my deep thanks to both Maggie and Matthew for their service.
Laurie Arp, Senior Director of Community Supported Technologies and Hosting Services at Lyrasis, presented on the establishment of the new CST Strategic Growth Fund, an initiative that has come out of ongoing work led by Bridget Almas to improve the Organizational Home services of Lyrasis. Approved by the Lyrasis Board at its spring meeting, the new fund is intended to provide targeted infusion of funding to help Community Supported Technology programs move forward on priorities identified by their communities. In ArchivesSpace’s case, the fund will subsidize some of the salary for a new position to improve standards support and testing for the next three years. In addition to the funds specifically for ArchivesSpace, there will also be cross-program investment to work on interoperability between the applications with homes at Lyrasis, which include CollectionSpace, DSpace, and Fedora. We are grateful to Lyrasis for its support.
Most of the meeting was devoted to considering some next steps to build on our strategic discussions this year. At each of our meetings this year we examined ArchivesSpace’s present and future through the lens of one of the facets from the It Takes a Village (ITaV) open source sustainability framework (Governance, Community Engagement, Technology, and Resources). In this meeting we discussed putting together a strategic roadmap incorporating each of the four ITaV facets that will guide activities over the next five years and work in conjunction with the development roadmap. More information will be available about this later in the year.
We then reviewed and approved the budget proposal for FY2025-2026, which included a request for additional staffing resources to support some of the activities that we identified through our strategic discussions as important to both serve our current community and widen our user base. We proceeded with establishing two new three-year term positions, a Standards and Testing Archivist and a Junior Developer. The Standards and Testing Archivist will work with community groups and program team members to maintain and improve metadata standards support in ArchivesSpace, including extending support for international descriptive standards, and contribute to improving our manual and automated test coverage and user documentation. This position will be partially funded through the Lyrasis CST Strategic Growth Fund. The Junior Developer will work on user-facing development in the ArchivesSpace application and increase our team development capacity for larger projects. We expect to begin the search process for these new team members soon. Thanks to the strong support of the ArchivesSpace community through membership and the additional investment from Lyrasis we are in a good financial position even in these challenging times to undertake this important work.
This is the last chair’s message of my term. As a representative from one of the Founding Partners of ArchivesSpace, it has been especially gratifying to see close up how the program has grown and matured over the years, and to have worked so closely with the community to embark on this next chapter of our history. Please feel free to reach out directly to me or to your elected representative if you have feedback you would like to share.
Best regards,
Erik Mitchell
Erik Mitchell, PhD
The Audrey Geisel University Librarian
UC San Diego Library
Pronouns: he/him
9500 Gilman Drive #0175G | La Jolla, CA 92093