My work at QAMRA

QAMRA - Queer Archive for Memory Reflexion and Activism

If you’ve not heard about QAMRA, it is because they are not quite open to public yet. Currently, it is a small archive that has set shop in a quiant neighbourhood of Bangalore, hoping to open its doors to the world sometime later this year.

My engagement

Last year, I was trying to position myself in Bangalore for a month so that I could take bouldering classes but, ended up spending close to about 7 months at the archive instead! My initial task was just to assist with their website building/hosting activities which was being designed by someone else. That expanded into nothing short of a serious affair which is continuing to drive my daily coding hours today.

I’m expected to write a report expanding on my work at QAMRA for their annual review. Since I’m also looking for people to contribute to the suite of applications I’m building (a subset of which would be used by QAMRA), I thought it would be better if I wrote a blog post here.

(Primarily for the benefit of the review committee) here’s the list of tasks that I was involved in, during the 7 months at QAMRA:

1. Coordination with K for the archive's website: My contribution was limited to setting up of the communication strategy, contact lists, marketing automation capabilities for the newsletter that would be signed up for via the website, and testing the website before and after launch.
2. Archiving tech-space research: As the in-house techie, my role was to understand the technology that enables archiving, research the standards and protocols for complianace and exchange, research existing solutions that other similar archives are using and distill a set of best-practices that could be employed for QAMRA.
3. Setting up basic/fast solution: As we began our exploration of the archiving technologies in use today, we began by setting up a simple online form based cataloging mechanism which continued to evolve as we learnt more about the domain. We later learned that this setup is employed by several newlow budget archives with limited resources and is a good launchpad for serious archving initiatives.
4. The Archival Guide: The world of archiving is one of dense standards, protocols that have evolved over several decades! To ensure that we have a manageable chunk of reference material at our disposal, we started an online guide that includes the essential and leaves out the unnecessary! It is a living document that is expected to become the (only) resource our volunteers would be required to read before they can become productive. Read (and contribute to) the Archival Fast Lane, here.
5. Requirements Specifications: We realised that several existing tools for a small (and sensitive) archive like ours either lack some essential features or are too clunky to be effectively used. We believe that this might be an opportunity to write our own set of tools and contribute to the archiving community. With this goal in mind, we began to write the requirement specifications document for the product that we were envisaging. This document can be found here: Software Requirements Specifications. It also captures the basic architecture which we began with (it has evolved since and would be published soon)!
6. QORE APIs: The core application that would form the bedrock of the archiving toolset is under active development. It is a scala based application that exposes GraphQL APIs and would use graph based databases for persisting the metadata. The state of this application can be traced here: QORE Please check the contribution section to read more about how you can become part of this journey. (We moved to notabug after Microsoft banned developers from USA embargoed countries from using Github.) It is part of a bigger vision that I have around personal archiving but solves the most immediate problem that QAMRA has as an archive - metadata creation/persistance. This application uses the latest EAD3 specifications from The Library of Congress
7. Anansi: Anansi is the frontend application that presents the Encoded Archival Document (EAD) in a human readable format. This is an experimental project but, is taking good shape as I explore Elm-lang (and fall in love with it) more!

Open Source from bottom up!

All the projects, documentation, code, collaboration presented here is Open Source with the GPL3 license: The code would remain free for use, modification, derivation at all times, any derived product needs to pass this "freedom" to their users.

collaboration

This would become a subset of a larger vision to bring archiving to people at large. The vision statement, problem, solution space, collaboration board (kanban), is at the project wiki. Please do check it out!