Régimen de Protección y Financiamiento Judicial de los Directores

Although the focus of this profile is aggregators and meta-aggregators, the following case studies of individual institutions provide another piece of context for aggregation: how do relatively well-resourced institutions navigate their relationship with aggregators and meta-aggregators? If one of the driving reasons for creating aggregations is to enable structured metadata creation and exposure for institutions that could not do so on their own, what do the decision making processes look like for an institution that can do it on their own?  

We chose the following institutions for the case studies based on their relationship with a state or regional aggregator and known choices about infrastructure:

! Harvard University (does not contribute to an aggregator)

! Oregon State University, Special Collections and Archives Research Center (Archives

West)

! University of Washington, Special Collections (Archives West) ! Yale University, Archives at Yale (Connecticut Archives Online) 13

All four institutions contribute to meta-aggregators: American Institute of Physics Finding Aids, ArchiveGrid, and History of Medicine Finding Aids

These institutions have very different relationships with aggregators. Harvard has no state or regional aggregator; both Oregon State University and the University of Washington were essential actors in forming Archives West; and Yale University participates in Connecticut Archives Online but has played little or no role in its development and sustainability. The University of Washington’s relationship with Archives West has changed over time; after focusing on local infrastructure for some years, the institution discontinued local infrastructure in favor of Archives West.

They tend to be early adopters of tools and innovations. Both Yale University and Harvard University have been heavily involved with developing ArchivesSpace; Oregon State University put finding aids online with some of the earliest technology for doing so.

Overall, these institutions choose to maintain local infrastructure because:

! They have the IT staff and infrastructure to do so.

! They want to enable local search tools to deliver all local content on a particular subject. ! They have a desire to control display, either at an institutional level or an individual

document level (e.g. curatorial staff who have strong personal opinions about display), and to ensure institutional branding.

! Their workflows are built around local infrastructure and they do not wish to change

them.

Oregon State University and Yale University choose to both maintain local infrastructure and contribute to an aggregation because more collection exposure is an advantage and consistent

Thanks to the following individuals for the time and effort on the individual profiles: Kate Bowers and

13

Jennifer Pelose, Harvard University; Elizabeth Nielsen, Larry Landis, and Ryan Wick, Oregon State University; Emily Dominick, Mark Carlson, Anne Jenner, and Jennifer Ward, University of Washington; Mark Custer, Yale University.

with their mission.  And, as long as they have enough staff resources, they can do both. Investing in automated processes, as Yale University is in the process of doing, is one way to enable this. Harvard University’s 30+ archival repositories (arguably an aggregation themselves) have maintained their own shared infrastructure and some shared practices since at least 2003. They began their ArchivesSpace migration in 2017 and have substantially customized that

infrastructure to interact with their Digital Repository Service. They contribute consistently to ArchiveGrid, but have no state or regional aggregator.

In the absence of automated processes, the aggregated descriptions may be significantly out of date with the local descriptions. This was the case for the University of Washington, whose local and aggregated descriptions fell severely out of registration between 2007 and 2014. Their decision to switch to Archives West as their sole public-facing infrastructure was based on a desire to give IT staff more time to do tasks that must be done locally and to be more standards compliant. The latter came about after an extensive internal process to re-envision processing workflows. The department uses an Orbis Cascade Alliance-hosted but customized instance of ArchivesSpace as their internally-facing infrastructure.

Conclusion

In light of these findings, we feel it is incumbent upon us to take stock as a community of where we are now and where we should be headed. Does our current aggregation model work? Should we continue on separate paths to maintaining existing statewide and regional aggregations? Or might we begin to pivot and work collectively towards a more robust, sustainable, shared infrastructure that would enable broad access to collections? Both paths involve risks. But we think the potential rewards of collective action may be far greater.

Changing course towards developing shared infrastructure will require strong leadership and a coalition of the willing. Our research suggests that aggregators have differential levels of

capacity and investment in maintaining their existing services--and hence, are likely to approach any collective action toward shared solutions with varied resources, commitment, and will. What we share, however, despite these differences is a deep commitment to providing

persistent, high quality access to archival collections; this alone should be enough for us to agree that we must act now to protect this domain and chart a path forward to a sustainable,

technically robust, and user-centered future for archival description aggregation. If we succeed in this effort, we will address a major gap in our scholarly communication infrastructure.

Appendices