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Accession review: Dunbar Library and Archive

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
55/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
css, html, javascript
Domain
devops, documentation

Research direction

Start by comparing DLA, DLA-CMS, DLA-locator, and Dunbar-Letters, then inspect the 15 open issues and the current data location. Try a clean clone within the 30-minute limit, check dunbar.udayton.edu, the org site, RERUM and TPEN docs, and published exhibits. Record deployment, runtime, and advisory findings, then make exactly one of the requested reactivate, archive, absorb, or leave calls.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

task

Alive but carrying a backlog. Created 2021-04-23, last pushed 2025-12-18. 15 open issues. HTML, JavaScript, CSS.

The DLA is not one site, it is a suite: DLA, DLA-CMS, DLA-locator, plus Dunbar-Letters as a test case. This issue covers the main repo. The suite relationship is the actual thing to resolve.

Specific things to check

  • Which of the four DLA repos are load-bearing and which are historical
  • Whether the 15 open issues are still valid or are 2021 thinking nobody cleaned up
  • Where the DLA data lives now and whether dunbar.udayton.edu still serves it. The Encoding Ambiguity proposal cites the Dunbar virtual archive as a comparable, so a dead link there is a grant problem, not just a repo problem.

What to produce

  1. Status line. One sentence: what this was for, and whether that purpose still exists.
  2. Health check. Does it run from a clean clone today? Timebox this to 30 minutes. If it does not run, record the blocker rather than fixing it.
  3. Live surface. Is anything from this repo still deployed or linked from a live page? Check the org site, the RERUM and TPEN docs, and any published exhibits. A dead URL that other people's pages still point at is a real problem.
  4. Dependency audit. Anything with a known advisory, anything pinned to a runtime that no longer ships.
  5. One call. Pick exactly one:
    • reactivate - worth working on again, and there is a reason
    • archive - historically useful, no future. Archive the repo and write the README eulogy.
    • absorb - the useful part belongs somewhere else. Name the destination and what moves.
    • leave - no decision needed now, revisit next year. Say so and close this issue.

Why bother

Filed from cubap/DriftMD#4. Low priority by design. These are free-cycle tasks, and the point of writing them down is that a future pass has somewhere to start instead of re-deriving everything from a git log.

Dominant language
HTML
Stars
0
Forks
0
No merged PRs in 30d

Getting set up

This project ships no dev container, Dockerfile or contributing guide, so setting up is up to you: start from its README, and see our first-contribution guide for the general steps.

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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