How to Participate

Participation in Archivists' Toolkit (AT) and/or OASIS is open to any interested Harvard repository. This page provides instructions on how to get started.

Setup instructions
Repository responsibilities
Liaison responsibilities

Setup instructions

Decisions and Notifications

1. What will be your finding aid authoring environment -- Archivists' Toolkit or desktop tools? Your decision determines which of the following setup steps are applicable. See the topic "AT's relationship to OASIS" on the AT Overview page for more information.
2. Appoint a local liaison who can coordinate setup activities with LTS. See the liaison responsibilities section (below) for more information.
3. Contact LTS about your plans to use the Archivists' Toolkit (AT) and/or OASIS. Include contact information for your local liaison in the message.

OASIS setup

3. [If using AT to generate finding aids, skip this step.] Acquire, install and configure XML authoring software (such as XMetal, Oxygen, or WordPerfect). See the MAT Affinity Group isite for more information about authoring software. Configure the software to use the Harvard-specific EAD schemas or DTD.
4. Send the following setup information to the OASIS support team in LTS:
• Full repository name.
• Name, email and phone number of local liaison.
• URL to repository web site.
• Repository code (usually the Aleph sublibrary code).
• NRS authority path for finding aids (see the list of active NRS paths).
• Link to thumbnail logo or shield for use on finding aids. (See thumbnail specifications.)
5. Request authorization to use the OASIS Interactive Loader.

Archivists' Toolkit (AT) setup

5. Install the AT desktop client and Harvard plugins. See Client installation instructions [pdf].
6. AT client login: LTS will set up your liaison's AT login. The liaison is responsible for setting up logins for any additional staff in your unit.
7. Use the AT client to create a repository profile. See AT User Manual, Chapter 5 [pdf].

Repository responsibilities

Each contributing repository is responsible for the following:

• Compliance with Harvard EAD encoding guidelines [pdf]. (Compliance is automatic if using AT to generate finding aids.)
• Ongoing sponsorship, support, and maintenance of finding aids in OASIS, including those created in the course of projects with short-term funding.
• Ongoing maintenance of a collection-level bibliographic record in HOLLIS for each collection that has a finding aid in OASIS.

Liaison responsibilities

Each repository that contributes to the Archivists' Toolkit and/or OASIS must have a local liaison.  A repository may share a liaison with another unit, but no repository should have more than one liaison.  (Note that this does not prevent a repository from authorizing multiple users for the AT client or the OASIS Interactive Loader.)

The local liaison’s primary responsibilities are the same as those of the repository (listed above) but also include:

• Serving as the primary contact for communication pertaining to local use of AT and the OASIS system.
• Coordinating finding aid markup activities at the repository, which may include user registration, maintaining local EAD templates (if using a desktop authoring tool), and maintaining a master list of EAD ID numbers.
• Reviewing finding aids for quality assurance.

A list of liaisons is available on the Help and Community page.