Author: Mark A. Matienzo

Are you curious about ArcLight and how it can integrate with ArchivesSpace and other systems? Learn more from the video below! Mark Matienzo and Gregory Wiedeman (University at Albany) present on ArcLight and ArchivesSpace as part of the Integrations with ArchivesSpace webinar series on May 12, 2020. Mark’s presentation provides background on ArcLight, its community-oriented development, its features, and the importance of integrations, and Greg’s presentation focuses on how University at Albany integrated ArcLight with ArchivesSpace, Hyrax, and Quicksearch to build University at Albany’s archives discovery system.

Last week, contributors from five institutions – Stanford University, Duke University, Indiana University, University of Michigan, and Princeton University – kicked off a collaborative nine-week work cycle for ArcLight. The work cycle, which runs from August 13 to October 11, 2019, will build on the ArcLight MVP implementation from 2017, and focuses on refining ArcLight’s usability and accessibility, addressing strategic needs in a community-based project. Major areas for this work cycle include:

• Usability and accessibility refinements, including potential design changes
• Revamping the tools used for indexing archival description into ArcLight’s Solr index
• Analysis and implementation supporting better integration with request management systems, digital object viewers, and more

You can follow our work on the #arclight channel on the Code4Lib Slack team or the GitHub project board for the current work cycle. We expect to release public demo videos on YouTube, and will share them on Slack as well as the arclight-community Google Group to report on our progress. The work cycle’s conclusion coincides with the 2019 Blacklight Summit, to be held in Durham, North Carolina from October 9-11.

Stanford Libraries is organizing a work cycle later this year for ArcLight, a Rails engine supporting discovery of archival material. The work cycle is expected to run from August 12 to October 11, 2019, with planned contributions in terms of staff and development time from Stanford University, University of Michigan, Indiana University, and Princeton University. This work expands upon the work undertaken between April to June 2017 to develop a minimum viable product, and focuses on adding features, fixing bugs, and ensuring it is better suited as a product for future adoption and development. 

As a part of planning for this work cycle, Stanford, Michigan, Indiana, and Princeton have begun developing a collaborative roadmap to help us scope candidate areas of development. Following the process undertaken recently by the Spotlight community, we are now looking for contributions to and feedback on the roadmap to inform our work. If you’ve previously shared evaluations of ArcLight internal to your organization, we welcome you incorporating your ideas for features and improvements to this document. Our first deadline for contributions to the ArcLight work cycle roadmap is June 28, 2019.

The ArcLight project team would like to provide a brief update regarding our progress on the design process and and timeline for further work. ArcLight is intended be a Blacklight-based environment that supports discovery and digital delivery of information in archives. The project team is using a community-oriented, collaborative design process for ArcLight to engage more institutions earlier in the process.