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Rockefeller Archive Center Aurora User Documentation |
Aurora is a web application that receives, virus checks, and validates transfers of digital archival records, and allows archivists to appraise and accession those records.
For technical documentation including how to install Aurora, see the README in the base branch of the aurora repository on the RAC's GitHub site.
The homepage of Aurora is a dashboard that provides key metrics about transfer activity including related graphs and charts. A context switcher allows users to access the dashboard for either their own transfer activity or their organization's activity. Archivists can switch between dashboards for all active organizations.
Aurora provides a searchable, sortable table to view information about all transfers. A button allows the download of a CSV file containing the data from the transfer table. Users can view the status of each transfer, which is updated as it moves through the process. There are 9 possible statuses:
- Transfer Started
- Transfer Complete
- Invalid
- Validated
- Rejected
- Accepted
- Accessioning Started
- In Accession Queue
- Accession Complete
Users can view more details about a particular transfer by clicking on its row in the table. The detail page provides, as applicable:
- Identifiers
- Error messages
- Metadata
- Manifest
- Log
- Rights statements
- Appraisal note
Archivists can review a queue of the valid transfers to ensure they are relevant to the collecting scope. The upfront validation provided by Aurora (particularly the BagIt Profile validation) should prevent most out-of-scope records from being received, but this step allows a manual check by users with the appropriate permissions (see Users section) who may:
- View transfer details
- Add an appraisal note (optional)
- Accept or reject transfers
When an archivist rejects a transfer, the donor account that submitted that transfer will receive an email notification that the transfer has been rejected, which will include the text of the appraisal note.
Once transfers have been accepted in the appraisal queue, they are moved to the accessioning queue, where multiple transfers can be grouped together into a single accession if they have the same organization, record creators and record type. Archivists with the necessary permissions can create accession records with data about one or (usually) more transfers, and point them to specific ArchivesSpace resource records.
Information about each accession is saved in the Saved Accessions tab, where archivists can view a table with information about each accession and click on an accession for more details.
Aurora provides the ability to manage organizations and users accounts with those organizations.
Organizations can be created or deleted by archivists with the necessary permissions. In addition, Aurora allows for the management of the BagIt Profile and PREMIS Rights Statements associated with the organizations.
BagIt Profiles allow for detailed validation of metadata elements included in a transfer. Aurora allows archivists to create, edit, delete and view these profiles, and provides a JSON representation of the Profile against which transfers can be validated. Each organization can only have one BagIt Profile.
PREMIS Rights Statements allow archivists to specify, in a machine-actionable way, what can and cannot be done with digital records based on the donor agreements. Aurora allows archivists to create, edit and delete one or more PREMIS Rights Statements, and associate them with record types. Record types are specified in the organization's BagIt Profile.
For details on PREMIS and the RAC's local implementation, see the Rockefeller Archive Center PREMIS Rights Statements Guidelines.
Aurora supports management of user accounts, and allows archivists with appropriate permissions to add users, declare user accounts active or inactive, associate them with an organization, and assign them to groups (to specify their roles and permissions).
Aurora implements the following user roles and associated permissions:
All users (including those form donor organizations) have a few basic permissions:
- View dashboard for own organization
- View all own organization transfers
- View all own transfers
- View own organization profile
- View rights statements for own organization
- View BagIt Profile for own organization
- View own user profile
- Change own password
In addition to the permissions for All Users, users who are archivists have the following additional permissions:
- View all dashboards
- View all transfers
- View all organizations
- View all organization profiles
- View all rights statements
- View all BagIt Profiles
- View appraisal queue
- View accessioning queue
In addition to the permissions of All Archivists, Appraisal Archivists have the following additional permissions:
- Accept or reject transfers
- Add appraisal notes to transfers
In addition to the permissions of All Archivists, Accessioning Archivists have the following additional permissions:
- Create accession records
In addition to the permissions of All Archivists, Managing Archivists have the following additional permissions:
- Accept or reject transfers
- Add appraisal notes to transfers
- Create accession records
- Add/edit organizations
- Add/edit users
- Add/edit rights statements
- Add/edit Bag-It Profiles
In addition to the permissions of All Archivists, System Administrators have the following additional permissions:
- Accept or reject transfers
- Add appraisal notes to transfers
- Create accession records
- Add/edit organizations
- Add/edit users
- Add/edit rights statements
- Add/edit Bag-It Profiles
- Change system settings
Aurora comes with a RESTful API, built using the Django Rest Framework. Users can interact with the API using a command-line client, but the application also includes a browsable API interface and the JSON API schema.
For more information, see the README in Aurora's GitHub repository.