 Hello, I'm Christine Devella, the Program Manager for Archive Space, and with me is Jessica Crouch, the Community Engagement Lead. In honor of Archive Space's 10th anniversary, we're here to share some reflections on our experiences in building a sustainable open source program. When I talk to people who've heard about Archive Space but don't really know what it is, I like to emphasize to them that Archive Space is really a few different interrelated things. First, and maybe most well understood, it's an archives information management software application. Supporting a range of functions commonly performed in archives and special collections like accessioning, arrangement, and description. It's open source, free for anyone to download and use, but with a membership model to promote sustainability. Developed by archivists and supported by diverse archival repositories around the world, it fills shared need for archives that has relatively few proprietary vendor solutions. But Archive Space is not only a software application, it's also the community that works together to create and improve that software application, making sure that what we create reflects our values. Values like flexibility, extensibility, customizability, interoperability, and integration, as well as being standards driven and deeply rooted in our different communities of practice and committed to finding the points where they intersect. Consciously or not, software is always an embodiment of those who create it. The Archive Space community works very hard and is very intentional in being sure that this application reflects what we care about as a community. And lastly, and this is what always been what excites me the most, Archive Space is an opportunity. Kind of opportunity that is possible when people come from different sizes and types of institutions with many different backgrounds, set aside their own individual ways of doing things to come together to take on their common challenges. While some of these challenges may look simple, they can have a big impact on an archive's capacity for serving their user communities. When these challenges are addressed, all users and potential users of archives can reap the many benefits that come from having better access to primary sources and the stuff of which history is made. Archive Space dates from June 2009 when representatives of New York University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of California San Diego, and the Mellon Foundation agreed to integrate Archivist Toolkit and Archon into a single application in order to increase overall functionality within a single application and to optimize sustainability of that application. Archive Space 1.0 was released on September 30, 2013, 10 years ago. The original members of Archive Space from this period are considered charter members, and by 2014 Archive Space had over 100 members and had established its user and technical advisory councils. Archive Space continues to evolve and grow as an application and as a community. There have been over a dozen releases of the Archive Space application since the 1.0 release, and the program team has grown from a single program manager to a team of five full-time and two part-time members, with Archivists and developers both represented on the team. We've now had almost 10 years of council participation, community engagement and growth, and the Archive Space community now includes 468 general and charter members, 19 educational program members, three registered service providers, and we welcomed our first consortium provider this year. Archive Space's membership model provides members with tangible benefits, like access to our help center, which includes our user manual. This manual is written and managed by the user documentation subteam of our user advisory council. The help center also contains our user tutorial videos and recordings of trainings, both of which are taught by members of our trainers core, which is comprised of users from institutions across the country. Membership also includes technical support and the ability to attend our member events, like our annual virtual member forum and our annual in-person member forum, where members present on the work they're doing at their own institutions. Outside of the forums, members communicate with each other via a variety of channels, including various member-only listservs. Membership also provides intangible benefits, like the ability to serve on advisory councils and governance groups within Archive Space, some of which I just highlighted. Council members serve as a voice in the user community, advocate for the future direction of the application, and determine development priorities for the application. Serving on a governance group enables members to have an active role in the future of Archive Space. Membership also provides an opportunity for archivists to participate in discussions with fellow archivists from a variety of institutions around the globe and to expand their own professional networks. And finally, archivists like myself, who used Archon or Archivist Toolkit before Archive Space, are well aware of the need for financial buy-in and support from institutions. Relying on a single or small number of organizations to support an application for an entire user community is unsustainable. By virtue of being a member-led organization, our work is done in incremental steps and often at a more deliberative pace. However, this thoughtful approach to development has proven more successful, and archivists seem receptive to this method because it reflects the iterative processes present in archival work. New features, as well as enhancements for the current functions in the application, make their way through a community development process that allows members to prioritize the changes and improvements to the application that would be most impactful for their work. This is why membership and buy-in from archives is so crucial. The wider representation of organizations, the more representative the application will be of how archivists work. Archive Space is an open-source application that's free to download and use. The code is available to anyone on GitHub, and many organizations develop plugins or other tools for the application to help facilitate their own work. We encourage these developers to then share their work via our awesome Archive Space GitHub. This is a community-generated list of Archive Space resources. We also encourage developers to present it at one of our many forums or webinars. Particularly popular plugins have been incorporated into the code of the application in the past. Another way community members have a profound impact on the application. Our development catalog and roadmap are open and discoverable online. Via our ticketing system, Jira, users can submit reports of bugs in the application, as well as feature requests. Feature requests and specifications are reviewed by the development prioritization subteam, and they recommend if a request should be passed on to development. Tickets with more substantive comments or with more support from the community are usually more successful because of the community support. Archive Space originated with a program manager as the only staff member. As I said, the program team now has five full-time and two part-time members. Program staffing has grown with the needs of the community, ensuring the program isn't dependent on one person's skills or institutional knowledge. The Archive Space Board and councils each have a chair and a vice chair. The vice chair assumes the role of chair at the start of the next term, and a new vice chair is elected. This process ensures continuity of leadership and builds in redundancy in the event that one of our community leaders needs to step away. All of Archive Space's teams and initiatives are heavily documented on our program's Wiki pages. Having a dedicated location for procedural information, meeting notes, and work plans ensures work can continue if a team member is no longer able to serve in their volunteer capacity, and progress is not impeded when new council members join at the start of a term year. The nature of working with volunteers is that life frequently happens. Members move to new jobs or have unexpected life changes or simply need to step back for a time. Externalizing our processes through documentation helps with both redundancy and accountability. It also means the learning curve that occurs every year when new council term begins is shortened. The chair, having served as vice chair the year before, is already familiar with the processes of the team, and since the teams are comprised of members serving out either their first, second, or third-year term, those serving for the first time are able to lean on other members of the team to catch up. There have definitely been plenty of challenges in our 10 years, and there are some evergreen challenges that may always be with us, though we work to come to more and more satisfying ways to coexist with them. For example, archives space exists in part because of the challenge of competing for scarce development resources within institutions in the library, archives, and museums space, rather than each organization building its own archives information management application, creating archives space as a collective provided a mechanism to efficiently pool financial resources and centralized development across the land community. And we've found that while we serve the entire archival community, some level of development still happens on the archives space application and many of the organizations that we serve. Now this isn't a bad thing. Having diverse viewpoints and approaches to development can actually be a very good thing, of course, but we find that it can be a challenge to get institutions to think of the development that they're doing for themselves or with contractors, having potentially even more value if it were contributed to the core code of archives space. It also continues to be a challenge to get individual people to think of themselves as developers who have valuable technical contributions to make in ways that could also benefit the community as a whole. It may take thinking of ourselves and our skill sets, especially for those of us who consider ourselves mostly self taught in the technology realm differently. And sometimes getting past fears of maybe not being technical enough and imposter syndrome. It also may take some creative thinking and reexamining the question of what an archive space developer looks like and where they may be found. We're currently hiring for a tech lead and it's prompting some good self reflection about what we could be doing differently in this area. Addressing none of this is easy, but it has potential to be transformative for how we approach the work of development in our community. Another evergreen challenge for archives space is surely familiar to almost any technical project, how to balance addressing technical debt with improving and extending the application in ways that are more apparent to users. A robust and active user community is a wonderful font of ideas for new and improved functionality for the application. And we could certainly spend all of our time adding new features and expanding what the application does. But the archives space application is also made up of a series of open source and custom designed technical components, some of which are reaching the end of their useful lifespan. We're currently in the midst of a significant infrastructure upgrade project that will bring us closer to our goal of bringing our technical debt down to a more comfortable level. But it takes time and a breadth of technical expertise that requires upscaling our small technical team and seeking out partners who can assist. Better communicating this challenge to users and better equipping our technical team with the resources they need to both pursue this work and make good choices about what needs attention and when is it ongoing focus. Reaching our 10 year anniversary has been exciting and thinking back on all that's been accomplished has been gratifying. But what we in our community look like at age 10 isn't what we looked like at age one. Many who were so instrumental to our early years have moved on to new challenges and those of us who have stayed have more than a few battle scars. But speaking for myself what keeps up my enthusiasm when it flags at times is knowing that there are always people for whom archives space is new and for whom it can be transformative. Tapping into the enthusiasm of those for whom it is brand new is key. And so is pausing occasionally from improving on what we've done before to look at our challenges and opportunities from the perspective of those fresh eyes helps us reinvent and reenvision what we do to meet the needs of who and where our users are now and where they want to go. So what comes next. Where will we be after another 10 years. It's impossible to know for sure that we're excited about some of the directions we're pursuing right now. We're putting renewed energy into reaching new audiences, both through in person and virtual engagement activities and concentrated improvements in the application. We're going to be working with community members on creating its specification for better more integrated multi-link will support for archival description and archives phase and launching a better platform for enlisting the participation of community members and providing translations. We're making thoughtful upgrades to our technology and rethinking some of the ways our code works with an eye towards streamlining and modernizing the code for our staff and public user front ends especially. And we're continuing to do everything in ways that are core to our identity for most leading with empathy and care and being a welcoming place where those who want to contribute can. We're putting renewed emphasis into our programs that support archival educators and students who are entering the profession. And we're envisioning what comes next for diversity partnership program, which is currently in the third year of a three year pilot for archives that primarily serve communities that are underrepresented in the archive space community. There are challenges out there for sure, but we have a great appetite on our team in our community to meet them. On this final slide we've posted some links. If you're interested in learning more about the archive space application or member community, our getting started page is a great place to begin learning about the application. Our website also contains information about our governance and membership. The wiki link contains documentation about community initiatives programs and development. And our YouTube channel contains demos recordings of trainings and recordings of past events. This is a frequently used resource for many archives space users. Thank you for watching and thank you to CNI for hosting this project video briefing. Please feel free to reach out to us at archivespacehome at lyricist.org with any questions.