Hot Brainstem

(To jump right to the survey and not read my blurblings, go here: Archivists’ Toolkit and Archon use in the Philadelphia Region)

Several months ago, I was able to tweak the EAD-XML exported from Archivists’ Toolkit and successfully import it into Archon.

In general, I feel that AT has more robust and stricter guts and works well for “the work of processing.” Archon, on the other hand, is about 500% friendlier, is easier to install and maintain, and has a public interface with the ability to serve up finding aids and digitized content right out of the box (so to speak). I know this kind of public interface is in the works for AT, but until it arrives and proves itself easy to use, my vote has to go to Archon for a smaller repository like mine.

While messing with AT and Archon, I got curious who in the Philly / Delaware Valley region is using Archivists’ Toolkit and Archon, and to what extent. I had heard from various people about testing both of them but I want to know the current state of things.

If I can get a decent numbers of responses, it might start to help us all make connections if and when we decide to use or test this packages. One way or another, I will post the aggregated responses.

If you are the broad Philly region, please take the survey: Archivists’ Toolkit and Archon use in the Philadelphia Region

I’ve been lucky enough that Christine Di Bella and Laura Blanchard have agreed to send out pleas to the DVAG and PACSCL mailing lists, which will happen in several weeks. Thanks!

[Survey respondent update - As of early on July 17]
10 people have completed the survey and there have been 111 abandoned visits to the survey page, where the visitor left without answering any questions. There is a good chance that many of these “bouncers” were robots and the like, but if you were a looker-and-leaver, please come back and fill it out! Thanks! Yet another link to the survey.

[Survey respondent update - As of July 23]
18 people have completed the survey and there have been 134 abandoned visits to the survey page.

John Armstrong, master of all trades and my pal, designed this collapsible custom book cradle for use with a large set of over 200 oversize volumes. The challenge was:

1. None of our current book cradles were large enough.
2. The content of this set of volumes (Philadelphia Maritime Exchange Records) is such that researchers use 2 to 4 volumes simultaneously.
3. The book cradles should be stored with the volumes, on already-cramped shelves.

John will be tweaking the design and making a total of four cradles, which I like to call the Franklin Street PortaCradle — named after John’s burgeoning tote bag business, Franklin Street (via Etsy).

I need to post photos of the tote John made me which is waxed cotton, blue, and awesome.

(video via Flickr; or video via YouTube if you prefer)

Update: John made four more PortaCradles on July 31.  We ended up using three of them the very next week for a researcher.  Check below for an action shot.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

Here is the first post on my new website. Visit again in 6-12 months to see more.