[Archivesspace_Users_Group] release candidate available - ArchivesSpace v2.7.0-RC1

[Christine Di Bella]

Hello ArchivesSpace members,

The ArchivesSpace team is pleased to announce a release candidate, v2.7.0-RC1. You can download it at https://github.com/archivesspace/archivesspace/releases/tag/v2.7.0-RC1 or test it out without downloading at http://test.archivesspace.org/staff (username admin /password admin). We encourage you to download and try it out with your own local setup and/or data if you can for the most accurate results.

This release candidate contains program-led and community pull requests that provide feature enhancements, bug fixes, and documentation updates, as well as a number of infrastructure improvements, which were a significant focus of this release. When testing, we highly encourage you to not only check out the new changes, but also to make sure that features you already use are working as intended.

In addition to small interface and functionality changes, this release candidate contains two larger areas of feature enhancement. One relates to recording information about language of description and materials. These changes were made to facilitate better standards compliance in these areas. For language of description language and script can now be recorded using controlled values as well as notes. For language of materials multiple languages and scripts can now be recorded using controlled values and notes. Some information about the new languages functionality is available at https://docs.google.com/document/d/14UlJseFzGhsoEkiSVTidJMQXizFLPjXr2fuf2Pa5iGQ/edit?usp=sharing. We encourage you to read through the documentation and make comments. This information will be incorporated into the user manual once the production release of 2.7.0 is available.

Existing language information in records has been migrated to the new or newly structured fields. While some ways of recording information could be easily accommodated in this migration, because there are so many different ways language information could have been recorded previously some situations will require data cleanup. As you look at language information in your records, if you see patterns in your data, please let us know. (An example might be that all of your description is in one language, but you never or only rarely recorded that language in the Language of Description field in Finding Aid Data.) We would like to help by creating some plugins that could be run to do bulk cleanup work in this area.

The second major feature enhancement, made to accommodate requests to use persistent identifiers in OAI-PMH harvests and exports, is that resources and archival objects can now be represented by Archival Resource Keys (ARKs). ARKs can either be generated by ArchivesSpace or created outside the application. Some information on the new ARKs functionality is available at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e0K2ZsSqWPxtKifCa_-ZyhAdyDJcJR0tA3S-N3X3FGU/edit?usp=sharing. This information will also be incorporated into the user manual.

Thanks to the many community members who made contributions to the work reflected in this release candidate, including individual archives staff and developers, our Development Prioritization sub-team, Testing sub-team, and the Core Committers Group.

We'll be collecting feedback through Monday, October 7. Please let us know at ArchivesSpaceHome at lyrasis.org<mailto:ArchivesSpaceHome at lyrasis.org> if you notice any problems with the specific areas addressed in this release, or if anything that was working before no longer is. Barring major issues, we expect to release v2.7.0 by mid-October.

Christine

Christine Di Bella
ArchivesSpace Program Manager
christine.dibella at lyrasis.org<mailto:christine.dibella at lyrasis.org>
800.999.8558 x2905
678-235-2905
cdibella13 (Skype)

[ASpaceOrgHomeMedium]

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