Greetings @us-hosted members!
Today, we are posting Pilot Activity #4: Software Description, Part II . Part II of this activity, which can be found in your designated EaaSI Pilot Google Workspace , asks the EaaSI Hosted Pilot Nodes to describe a piece of software IN YOUR OWN COLLECTIONS using a lightweight version of the EaaSI metadata application profile. Similar to Part I, there are three steps to the activity - review, describe, and reflect. For the reflection section, please jot down your thoughts/bulleted responses in the blank text area underneath the guiding questions.
NOTE: If you do not have any software in your collections currently, or if you are unsure - that’s OKAY! Feel free to skip this one - but also…you might do a quick check in with your curators, accessioning staff, archivists, and any other collections staff just to see if there are search terms that might surface software that has been more or less passively collected over the years!
The goals of this activity include:
- Better understanding of variations in your organizational descriptive/discovery practices overtime:
- Has software been bundled during the ingest/acquisition process so that it is indistinguishable from data in your current repository system(s)?
- Determine what steps would need to take place to more easily identify/locate common, complex formats across your digital collections.
Please complete the activity (directly in the Google doc) by Friday, April 16 .
We have purposefully slowed down our pilot activities timeline to reflect a more sustainable pace and to acknowledge the persistent “expect-the-unexpectedness” of 2021. After Software Description Part II wraps up, we’ll have one more forum discussion before launching into Formal Testing. We will base our next forum discussion prompt on a combination of themes from our April node call and everyone’s responses to Software Description Part II.
Before Formal Testing begins, each of your node teams will receive a log-in to their own cloud-hosted instance of EaaSI. The node lead designated for each team will be able to create additional accounts and logins to each instance. Ethan will publish instructions associated with a Formal Testing protocol comprised of a set of specific tasks/actions that we ask all node team testers to complete, with ample room for notes and feedback on challenges each user encounters along the way.
If you all have any questions about Pilot Activity #4, please post your questions as a reply to this post.
Thank you all so much!