Written by Josh Conrad, Digital Initiatives Archival Fellow
In the summer and fall of 2025, a team of librarians, archivists and IT staff at UT Libraries, including at the Alexander Architectural Archives and the Benson Latin American Collection, began implementing a new archival management system using the popular ArchivesSpace web-based software platform.
For the Alexander, the process of migrating our collections metadata to a new web-based data system has allowed us to publish and greatly enhance our extensive archival catalog of architectural records, much of which has, to date, only been available internally in disparate legacy databases and spreadsheets. Further, ArchivesSpace has allowed us to introduce more streamlined, and AI-enhanced, metadata processing workflows that can help to make our archival items more findable to students and other researchers.
As a Digital Initiatives Archival Fellow at the Alexander, I was hired to compile and merge the archive’s disperse datasets using customized Python scripting workflows that could arrange the data into the exact structure and format needed for ingest into ArchivesSpace. Further, I helped to install the initial ArchivesSpace local testing environments for Alexander staff to use to start to get to know the new software until UT Libraries IT staff was able to install the system on a web server .
In tandum, we are using this newly-organized data to help design and prepare collections to move back to our home in Battle Hall, which is currently under renovation. Due to my additional background working in the architecture field, I have also been able to use AutoCAD architectural drawing software to model a more compact and efficient use of container storage space at Battle Hall. As a result, we will be able to import data about future locations for containers into ArchivesSpace before our move back to Battle Hall.
ArchivesSpace will allow us to combine together multiple legacy metadata systems representing collection items, accessions, containers, container locations, and digital files, and allow us to continue to publish our collections catalogs as EAD finding aids hosted at TARO (Texas Archival Resources Online). Because of ArchivesSpace’s modular linked-data structure, importing our legacy databases will create new connections between records that did not exist before.
For example, for the 1921 Neil P. Anderson Building in Fort Worth designed by Sanguinet, Staats, and Hedrick (SSH), the Alexander holds historic architectural drawings in the SSH collection as well as historic photos in the Atlantic Terra Cotta Company Records (ATC), the manufacturer of the building’s exterior terra-cotta features. ArchivesSpace will allow us to link these two items with shared metadata that can also connect this architectural work to other contemporaneous projects by SSH and ATC, and other early Modern architecture in Fort Worth.
In early 2025, the Alexander worked with students from the MS in Information Technology and Management (MSITM) program at the McCombs School of Business to develop a scripted workflow for migrated some of our most complex data, our architectural drawings catalog, from a legacy FileMaker Pro database into a more standardized form for ArchivesSpace. This project helped to introduce Alexander archivists to new possibilities of improving our collections metadata through programmatic AI LLM prompting, such as for named entity recognition (NER) tasks that were too complex for conventional text pattern-matching approaches.
Ultimately, with greater standardization and interlinking of our collections metadata, we hope to continue the next phase of the UT Architectural Collections Gazetteer to add the rest of our collections data to the map. Currently on the Gazetteer we have only a few collection datasets as a proof of concept. Read more about the Gazetteer project here.
