Earlier in October, APTrust convened over fifty colleagues to explore and discuss the many challenges of digital preservation. Coming from across the country, we had IT specialists, digital preservation librarians, archivists, library leaders, and, of course, the APTrust Staff. It was a full day and a half of updates—financial, membership, governance, and working groups. Some top highlights:
New Software Release
Production Services
APTrust has just released a new version of its software. Even though our initial software release had demonstrated the ability to handle just about any payload from our members there were ways in which our various services could function more efficiently and at greater scale. As a result, APTrust’s Lead Developer, Andrew Diamond, was able to rewrite APTrust's services and Registry to take advantage of modern cloud infrastructure, reducing operating costs and improving our systems scalability, reliability, and maintainability. Andrew has also helped communities within and outside of APTrust adopt DART as a tool for preservation ingest.
In the coming year, Andrew will thoroughly document APTrust’s new systems, polishing our Registry's user interface, making improvements to DART, and describing our new systems and architecture to the greater archival and tech community.
Keep an eye out for Andrew at various conferences discussing this work.
DevOps and Security
Flavia Ruffner has taken the lead on securing the APTrust digital footprint by rearchitecting the infrastructure to a modern and simplified platform. Working closely with Andrew Diamond, she migrated APTrust services to an all micro-services solution deployed in an agile manner. Cloud native services enabled APTrust to lower costs and shrink the operation footprint, while building relationships with vendors.
Future focus is to continue with security initiatives including documenting the new APTrust environment, using new data about costs to better plan for efficiency in ops, while heightening awareness of the new system to the wider tech community.
Flavia will continue to deepen her knowledge of cloud services and will be presenting on her work in the next year.
Website
APTrust has released an updated version of its website. Adding new functionality, improved accessibility and an expanded documentation section that the community will begin augmenting, the new website will serve the membership in a more streamlined fashion. This enhanced website marks a significant upgrade from our previous web presence—having undergone accessibility and an information architecture overhaul. We are adapting to the changing needs of our community - both as member and as colleagues. Take a look and let us know what you think.
Membership
APTrust, having recently added two new members, University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, continues to add to its preservation footprint crossing the 250TB mark and climbing. Our team and working groups continue to refine and expand our transparency through policies, financial documentation, and governance. Stay tuned for more news in the coming months. The meeting was a wonderful opportunity to both introduce new organizations to what APTrust is about but also for colleagues to meet and socialize with others who previously were only seen in virtual, rectangular form. We had a guest speaker from AWS talk about the future of digital preservation and what is happening across the landscape. We reviewed some draft policies and updated various governance elements. Our shared documentation is always publicly available and can be found here. Feel free to look it over and let me know if you have any questions or feedback.
Bradley Daigle
APTrust Executive Director