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AVSpace is a plug-in for ArchivesSpace that adds support for describing specific characteristics of archival audiovisual materials that are useful for archivists and researchers alike.

We started by analyzing the ArchivesSpace data model, reviewing a selection of real world EAD instances, and discussed our observations of archival descriptive practice. This process informed the requirements for the AVSpace plug-in.

We are working with data at the JSON object-level, rather than the EAD itself. Work still needs to be done to ensure that this data is pushed out and encoded appropriately when the EAD is produced from ArchivesSpace.

Features

AVSpace provides more specific types for the container component and extent types. In ArchivesSpace out of the box, the only existing container option for an AV thing is "reel", but AV items can take many other forms, as you can see by the reviewing the RDA Carrier list: http://www.loc.gov/standards/valuelist/rdacarrier.html. For the AMIA Hack Day 2014 plug-in prototype, we selected just the subset of video carriers from this list to be available via the plug-in, but we intend to flesh out the list for all AV carriers.

(Brian to revise) AVSpace offers a new sub-record type called "extent duration" as an option for the extents field associated with a resource or other object records in order to capture duration information (running time) in a controlled form. So, for example, instead of "22mins." entered in a note, physical description field or other field, the ASpace user has access to dedicated fields, one each for hour, minutes, seconds, so that total running time for a time-based media object can be encoded and managed in a structured way.

AVSpace enables the encoding of more specific AV formats at the instance level. For an instance, we need another field for capturing physical media format type -- values such as "Betacam" or "DAT" or "DVD" -- that is non-hierarchical under the container 1 type. Ultimately we'd like to see the PBCore list (http://metadataregistry.org/concept/list/page/3/vocabulary_id/145.html) but this is too long for the prototype, and up for versioning in the new future, so for now we draw on IASA's list of formats (http://www.iasa-web.org/cataloguing-rules/5b-extent-specific-material-designation-type-format).

Misc. notes generated during development process:

Sample EAD: https://gist.github.com/quoideneuf/80aed673f818ba6a5ffa

We want archival description of an AV collection or instance to be represented in the actual JSON object from which Aspace creates EAD!

JSON models for objects in ArchivesSpace: https://github.com/archivesspace/archivesspace/tree/master/common/schemas