Command Line Interface (CLI)

We have been testing the developer preview of AT Version 2.0 Update 6, which now features support for the command line interface. Based on work from Cyrus Farajpour at USC, the new version and corresponding ATCLI plug-in developed by Cyrus and Nathan Stevens allow for development of handy command line instructions such as batch export of resources--something we and perhaps others with lots of finding aids are excited about. After initial testing, the plug-in has been modified to address memory consumption issues (a new session needs to be open for each record otherwise the records get cached and used up memory) and allows for specification of output directory.

Our first batch export test of our 3000+ resources was performed on my desktop (2.99 GHz processor, 2 GB RAM) under normal workload. It took approximately 96 hours for the process to complete! Given these results, we've tweeked our approach quite a bit, running it from a better computer and adjusting the amount of memory assigned to the atcli.lax file (see AT's FAQ's for instructions). This seems to help a bit. The main problem though for us is the sheer number and size of our finding aids. No matter what we do, it's going to take some time. In addition, we have several finding aids that don't need to get exported. Ideally, we'd like to be able to select which finding aids to export (i.e. those not marked internal only or those updated since a given date). Perhaps further modifications to the the plug-in will allow such customization.

For the time being, we'd like to thank Cyrus and Nathan for developing this key tool and look forward to working with others to improve it's design and functionality.

UPDATE (6/23/2010)
Good news. Cyrus has modified the command line plug-in to incorporate parameters, allowing you to specify which subset of resources/EAD you want to export from the AT. The parameters include: findingAidStatus, author, eadFaUniqueIdentifier, resourceIdentifier1, resourceIdentifier2, resourceIdentifier3, resourceIdentifier4, internalOnly, and lastUpdated. Plus, you can use any combination of these to easily fine-tune the export process as necessary. For more information on setting up and using the plug-in check out his github site: http://github.com/smoil/AT-CLI-Export-Plugin