Announcements

During the past two years, West Virginia archival institutions joined Virginia Heritage to broaden resources for researchers from both states. Virginia Heritage as a name has served us well for more than twenty years, but now that West Virginia has joined, it is time for a change.

Recently the membership voted on a new name for Virginia Heritage. The winner is Archival Resources of the Virginias (ARVAS). Thank you very much to everyone who suggested new names and voted!

The process of officially changing the name will take some time and will occur over the next several months. Karen King, a member of the Governance Team, has design experience and has graciously agreed to create a new logo. Once that is completed, the Outreach Team will update the WordPress site and promote the new name.

Stay tuned for future updates and opportunities to help with the transition.

Details: Kira Dietz (Assistant Director, Special Collections and University Archives) and Corinne Guimont (Digital Scholarship Coordinator) at Virginia Tech, will talk about how they collaborate when it comes to archives and digital scholarship. We’ll share projects, training, and tools, at many levels, whether you’re new to digital scholarship, a veteran, or just curious to learn about what we do together! Plus, we’ll have plenty of time for Q&A, if you want to tap into our combined wisdom about partnering up around digital scholarship.

Please register for the meeting using this form. Once completed, please copy the Zoom link in the confirmation to your calendar. A reminder, with the link, will be sent to registrants the morning of the session.

Update: This session will be recorded. Visit the Resources page for a link to recordings.

Details:
Contributing to the DPLA – Member Perspectives
The Digital Virginias Service Hub for the Digital Library of America (DPLA) launched in 2019, and in the following year, the Hub brought on its first two additional contributors – George Washington’s Mount Vernon and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Lesley Parilla (Mt. Vernon) and Courtney Tkacz (VMFA) will discuss their experiences and lessons learned, focusing especially on the technical requirements for participation. Member(s) of the Digital Virginias Service Hub Strategy Team will also be in attendance to answer any additional questions about the DPLA.

Please register for the meeting using this form. Once completed, please copy the Zoom link in the confirmation to your calendar. A reminder, with the link, will be sent to registrants the morning of the session.

Details: Join us for this open session. Members of the Governance, Tech, and Outreach teams will be available to answer your VH questions and to provide updates about recent changes to the database. Did you attend a previous session or watch the recordings and have questions? This is your chance to follow up. Do you have suggestions for a new name for Virginia Heritage or for future sessions? Join this session and share your ideas.

Please register for the meeting using this form. Once completed, please copy the Zoom link in the confirmation to your calendar. A reminder, with the link, will be sent to registrants the morning of the session.

Details: Kira Dietz, Tech Team Chair, will be discussing Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS) and the DACS-compliant EAD form she created to assist members in generating finding aids for Virginia Heritage.

Please register for the meeting using this form. Once completed, please copy the Zoom link in the confirmation to your calendar. A reminder, with the link, will be sent to registrants the morning of the session.

As many Virginia Heritage members may know, we have been working on making a test server, which incorporates automated harvesting of ArchivesSpace instances to the database, our live site. We've still been working on some bugs and improvements for this version. We have also had an on-going security certificate issue. This week, however, Virginia Heritage was taken offline due to some surprise circumstances. In response, we opted to put the new server online, rather than experience a potential sustained downtime. So...

What does this mean for member institutions?

• For ALL Virginia Heritage member institutions:
  • You will see a large increase in the available number of finding aids. That's because the database includes manually uploaded files AND automatically harvested files. Figuring out how to de-duplicate the database in on the bug list.
  • Speaking of the bug list:
    • We know that this expedited change has created some bugs, display issues, feature requests, and questions.
    • We highly encourage you to report these in our new spreadsheet (h/t to the Outreach Team for hosting!). Please include the date, your name, and an explanation of the bug, issue, request, or your question. We ask that you review the list BEFORE submitting your item and if it relates to something on the list, use the "Additional Comments" field to add your input with your name.
    • VH Governance, Technology, and Outreach will work on prioritizing and updating our partners about progress on submitted items.
• For Virginia Heritage member institutions who have supplied the Technology Team with an ArchivesSpace OAI-PMH harvestable interface:
  • Your finding aids are now automatically being ingested, updated, and re-index daily.
  • You do not need to upload new finding aids through the administrative site if you are publishing them in your ArchivesSpace instance. Please let me know (kadietz@vt.edu) if you have questions about this process, have ASpace and would like to be included, or want to know more.
  • You will see duplicate entries for finding aids you have previously added to VH, as well as your new files. We have not resolved the duplication process, but it is on our bug list.
• For Virginia Heritage member institutions who are creating EAD files using the clip library, a template, or the Google form:
  • You may continue to upload them through the administrative site.
  • Since we have resolved the http/https certificate issue, a temporary fix that a few member institutions may have been using, should be reverted. If you use a template to create EAD files, and changed all your "https" to "http"" you will want to change you template back to "https" before uploading future files.
  • If you have an issue with the upload process or need help unpacking an error, please let me know (kadietz@vt.edu) and I can help troubleshoot.

What does this mean for Virginia Heritage users (internal and external)?

• If you work with the public or search guides yourself, there are a few things to note (feel free to share these with researchers or point them to this post):
  • Search and browse functionality has not changed!
  • There are some additional organizations represented!
  • You will see duplicate entries for finding aids that were previously in the database and which are now being harvested automatically. This is not permanent&emdash;we will de-duplication the system&emdash;but if you see two records for the same collection, this is probably why.
  • Since the current database is also drawing from two sources, you will also see two additional finding aid publishers: Virginia Heritage (finding aids manually added to the original database) and ArchivesSpace (finding aids harvested directly from the organization). You can use these as filters or facets to limit your results until we de-duplicate the database.
  • You may see additional records for different type of materials, depending on what records institutions have published. For example, you will now find descriptive records for art, maps, and textiles housed at Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archives, based on how they are using ArchivesSpace.
  • Some finding aids may look a little different or be formatted in different ways. Please be aware that some cosmetic changes may take longer, but we will be working on display improvements.

Have a question that wasn't answered here? Please let me know (kadietz@vt.edu) and I can try to help. We appreciate everyone's patience as we adapt on the fly and we'll plan to use this space to communicate updates as we have them.

Session title: Excelerating Finding Aids in Virginia Heritage and ArchivesSpace
Presenter: Steven Bookman, Old Dominion University
Description: The presentation will cover a new process to import finding aids into Virginia Heritage and ArchivesSpace using the same spreadsheet. It will also show how each finding aid is displayed in both Virginia Heritage and ArchivesSpace. Steve has developed this process for use at ODU once their migration to ArchivesSpace is completed. The process might be useful for smaller institutions that may not have the staff and resources to create EAD finding aids for ArchivesSpace or Virginia Heritage.

Please register for the meeting using this form. Once completed, please copy the Zoom link in the confirmation to your calendar. The session will be recorded for those unable to attend the live session.

The Governance Team of Virginia Heritage invites members to join us for the first of a regular series of sessions on topics related to Virginia Heritage. The goal is to come together for discussions and presentations that will be useful to our members. These sessions will be held on the first Thursday of the month at 11:00 a.m. While we will save this time for meetings, there may not be one every month. As meetings are scheduled, we will alert the members and post a schedule on https://arvasarchive.org/.

The first meeting (December 3, 11:00 a.m.) will be a Q&A session to discuss the following:

• Answer questions about serving on the Governance Team. We are working toward implementing the election parameters as defined in the Principles of Collaboration and are soliciting nominations for new members.
• New name for Virginia Heritage. Since we are expanding to include West Virginia institutions, it is time to select a new name. We would like your suggestions!
• Ideas for future meetings. What would be beneficial to you? What do you want to know?

Register for the meeting using this form. Once completed, please copy the Zoom link in the confirmation for your calendar.

Questions? Contact vaheritageoutreach@gmail.com

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On a related note, Virginia Heritage now has a Slack Channel! If you’d like to join, follow this link. Contact Kira Dietz (kadietz@vt.edu) for more information, if you have any problems joining, or need help with Slack. We hope to use this as another avenue to share information, field questions, and communicate about events.

The Governance Team for Virginia Heritage would like to update you on recent events within our community. We have been consistently expanding our membership over the years and have successfully worked with the University of Virginia Library to stabilize the VH infrastructure. Building on that solid foundation, we have recently begun the process to integrate some key stakeholders from West Virginia to create a new, combined effort to provide descriptive access to our rare and unique holdings. Like Digital Virginias our DPLA Service Hub, this collaboration across both states will provide new opportunities for engagement and participation.

To that end, we are updating our governance structure and will adapt how Virginia Heritage has operated over the last twenty years. Virginia Heritage Governance invites you to review and comment on our updated governance document and consider how you or someone from your organization could get involved.

We request feedback from the community through the month of September and will be available to answer any questions you might have. In the meantime, we are soliciting ideas for a new name that reflects the combined nature of our new effort. Please send any ideas to Lynn Eaton (leaton4@gmu.edu). We plan to have a few open sessions to discuss these events later in the Fall, the first slated for Tuesday, 29 September, 1 p.m. You can sign up for the open session here.