Archivematica 1.8 and Storage Service 0.13 release notes

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Work in progress

Supported environments

Link to installation instructions.

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Make special note of any changes to supported environment.

Added

Describe new features.

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This is a description of this amazing feature! Here's why it's a net benefit to the project and the community. Also included are any special notes, like if it's a beta feature.

This work was sponsored by some amazing institution. Thank you!

• Documentation: link
• Pull requests: link

Processing configuration reset and download buttons

A new installation of Archivematica comes with a pre-set processing configuration called "default", and a second one (used only in Jisc workflows) called "automated". In testing, users are encouraged to change the configurations to suit their workflows, but may need to reset the configuration to the installation pre-sets. A reset button has been added so that users can easily change the default and automated processing configurations back to their installation pre-sets.

The second part of this feature is the addition of a download button for the processing configuration files. If you create a custom processing configuration, you can download the resulting processingMCP.xml file using the button and then include it at the top level of your transfer. Archivematica will then use this to automate your transfer selections, rather than the default configuration.

This work was sponsored by Jisc. Thank you!

• Documentation: Processing configuration documentation
• Issue: #1138

Changed

Describe enhancements or major fixes.

Streamline checksum verification

This enhancement de-duplicates checksum verification in Archivematica, which helps to improve the performance of Archivematica in processing large transfers (many files and/or large files). This enhancement includes three changes:

• Remove the "Verify checksums generated on ingest" micro-service
• Enhance the "Verify AIP" micro-service to bulk query the database for transfer-generated checksums and then verify that they match what is documented in the bag-generated manifest-<ALGORITHM>.txt.
• Have "Verify AIP" create an AIP-level "fixity check" PREMIS:EVENT that it can pass to the Storage Service, which will document this verification in the pointer file.

This should not impact regular workflows, but it is worth noting that there is no AIP-level fixity check PREMIS event for uncompressed AIPs, which don't have pointer files. For uncompressed AIPs, there are still object-level fixity events in place. Note that there is an issue in the Archivematica Issues repository regarding this note - Problem: uncompressed AIPs need pointer files #32

This work was sponsored by Columbia University Library. Thank you!

• Issue: #918
• Pull requests: PR 1012

File format identification updates

Archivematica 1.8 is now up to date with PRONOM v.94! For more information on new data added to PRONOM, check the PRONOM release notes.

This work was sponsored by the Denver Art Museum. Thank you!

Indexing can be enabled/disabled for Transfers and/or Archival Storage

Previously, the ElasticSearch index feature could be disabled globally as a scalability measure since indexing consumes a lot of resources. However, this also disabled Backlog and Appraisal features (which also uses indexing) and which some users still wanted to access. As of release 1.8, Archivematica can be deployed to run with indexing enabled just for Transfers (Backlog and Appraisal enabled), just for Archival Storage (Backlog and Appraisal disabled), for both indexes, or for none.

• Issue: 1172

Fixed

• ASCII codes can't decode when the filename contains a backtick
• AIP re-ingest fails
• PREMIS events from previous transfers are re-appearing
• Metadata reingest fails when dc:type is null
• Use 7-zip without compression (Copy) mode
• Metadata added before "Approve Transfer" disappears
• Generate AIP METS fails for bag SIPs if bag-info.txt has multiple instances of the same label
• Zip files with diacritic characters are failing to extract
• DSpace REST login error in SS
• Unable to edit DSpace REST Space settings in SS
• restructureBagForComplianceFileUUIDsAssigned needs to create intermediate directories for Zipped bag transfers - Community contribution by Hillel Arnold. Thank you!
• Ingest fails if Archivematica isn't connected to the Internet

Upgraded tools and dependencies

• Fido has been upgraded to version 1.3.12
• Siegfried has been upgraded to version 1.7.10
• FITS has been upgraded to version 1.1.0

End of life dependencies

Archivists' Toolkit integration

Archivists' Toolkit has been deprecated since 2013. The Archivists' Toolkit DIP upload feature has not had active development or testing since then. There are no plans to start testing or to fix any problems with the feature. As a result, there is a proposal deprecate this feature in Archivematica 1.9. Community response is welcome via a comment on the issue in GitHub.