ArchivesSpace Version 2.8.1 is Available!

Hello everyone,

Please see this message from Christine Di Bella about the new ArchivesSpace 2.8.1 release:

"ArchivesSpace is announcing the availability of v2.8.1. You can download it at https://github.com/archivesspace/archivesspace/releases/tag/v2.8.1.

This release includes improvements to the spreadsheet importer, additional settable record type preferences, some bug fixes and small feature improvements, and a number of infrastructure upgrades. Included among these are some performance, indexer, and small backend and staff interface improvements courtesy of work Hudson Molonglo did for ArchivesSpace member institution Queensland State Archives as part of a larger project.

For spreadsheet importer fans: Some changes have been made to the spreadsheet importer in this release to extend its functionality and improve its performance, especially with large spreadsheets. Of particular note: there is now a validation option so that a user can do a test run with a file, providing the opportunity to clean up any errors outside ArchivesSpace before doing the actual import; the importer now accepts either Excel spreadsheets or CSV files that use the templates at https://github.com/archivesspace/archivesspace/tree/master/templates; and, while it is accessed from a resource record or resource component as before, the import now runs as a background job so that it can more easily handle large files and to make the log file downloadable and saved within ArchivesSpace. Also, a number of bugs that were introduced with the conversion of the spreadsheet from a plugin to ArchivesSpace have been fixed for this release.

Thanks very much to community members Andrew Morrison, Blake Carver, Brian Harrington, Dee Dee Crema, Douglas Simon, Greg Wiedeman, James Bullen, Jeremy Markowitz, Joshua Shaw, Mark Triggs, Noah Geraci, Payten Giles, and Steve Majewski for their code contributions to this release. Program team members Lora Woodford and Mark Cooper wrote and reviewed code and supervised the work of Bobbi Fox and Brian Zelip, who worked with us as contractors on this release. This release would, of course, not have been possible without the hard work of so many of our community groups, including our Development Prioritization, Testing, Technical Documentation, and User Documentation sub-teams, and Core Committers Group."

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Valerie Addonizio has written an article about what you need to know to update to version 2.8.1: https://support.atlas-sys.com/hc/en-us/articles/360057252874-What-s-new-in-ArchivesSpace-v-2-8-1