[Archivesspace_Users_Group] Question about Preparing Level/Container Manager in Archon for Migration

[Prom, Christopher John]

Julie,

Apologies for the delay in answering your questions.

1.  Yes.  If  the level/container names do not have anything to do with the intellectual structure/arrangment of materials in a collection, they should be marked as physical container.

2. It sounds to me like these should be marked as physical only containers.  Unless you have good reason to change them, I would just leave them however they are marked.  If you do want to find them, you would need to do a query agains the against the backend sql database in order to find these.

  *   First, get the ID numbers of the mystery level container database by opening tblCollections_LevelContainers in a mysql client such as phpMyAdmin.   You should be able to just open the tables and find the ones you need or can run a query "SELECT ID, LevelContainer FROM tblCollections_LevelContainers"
  *   Second, run a query such as "SELECT ID, CollectionID, LevelContainerID FROM tblCollections_Content WHERE LevelContainerID = x" where x = each of the ID's from step 1.  This will give  you a list of the collections and content nodes where the level containers are used.
  *   Third, navigate to the url http://yourarchon/index.php?p=collections/findingaid&id=4719#id111230  where the first ID = the CollectionID and the second = the contentID

The important point I would like to stress is that you should not need to do any of this.  I never reviewed any 'strange' level containers in the 8 archon databases I used for testing during migration development, and all of them migrated fine so far as I could tell.

3.  If there are other types that are checked as intellectual you can leave the archon "LevelContainer" field as is.  This will become part of the component unique ID in ASpace, e.g. "Series 1" or "File 23".  But you should try to set the proper EAD level in archon for every LevelContainer where intellectual level if checked since this is important for the EAD files.   What this means is that if the EAD level field in Archon contains  tanything other than one of the EAD level attributes allowed in the tag library, it will be passed along as 'otherlevel' in ASpace.  While this may be warranted in some cases, I am recommending that that they be set to one of the allowable values from the controlled list in the tag library, wherever the level can be mapped to one of the allowable values.  (If this does not make sense, let me know, and I can provide a few examples from our local implementation.)

4. As a follow on to question three, if you leave those as is, they will be placed in ASpace to mark any components to which the are attached as <c 'level=otherlevel' otherlevel='sub-sub-series'> or whatever value is recorded in the the EADlevel in Archon.  The value of the "LevelContainer" field itself from Archon actually becomes part of the component unique ID in ASpace.

 I know this sounds confusing, but for the most part you will not need to worry too much about these issues.  I took a great deal of time to map the information from ARchon to ASpace, and as a first step you may just wish to run a test migration without changing anything, to see how the data looks.  The most important point is to make sure that physical only containers are marked as such, and that the proper EAD levels are marked when you can use a proper one instead of other level.  For the most part, the tool will sort everything properly if these two steps are taken care of.

Chris Prom
Univeristy of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

On Jan 15, 2014, at 5:16 PM, "Grob, Julie" <jgrob at uh.edu<mailto:jgrob at uh.edu>> wrote:

Hi all,

I am working on preparing our content in Archon for migration to ArchivesSpace. Let me preface my question by saying that I’m stepping in because we are between Archon managers, and I am quite rusty on a lot of this. It has also been many years since I worked with EAD, and we don’t ever export our Archon finding aids to EAD, so there may be some things that need standardization.

I’m on step 4 – Level/Container Manager. We have about 30 different Level/Container types, and it doesn’t seem to be consistent as to whether they were marked as Intellectual Level or Physical Container when they were created.  Other than the default types.

1. Can I assume that most created Level/Container types should probably just be checked off as Physical Containers because they’re not part of the intellectual hierarchical structure of a finding aid? (Cassette, Drawer, Film, Map, etc.)

2. There are a number of Level/Container types where I’m not sure what they were created for (Room? Track?) I wanted to search Archon for the actual content that was described by these mysterious Level/Container types, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to do that. Should I just assume that these are Physical Containers?

3. Are there any other “Intellectual” or “Intellectual & Physical” types I should be looking out for other than the ones listed in the Archon documentation? (collection, fonds, class, recordgrp, series, subfonds, subgrp, subseries, file, item, otherlevel).

4. We do have sub-sub-series and sub-sub-sub-series. What would the EAD level be for those.

Thanks for your help. I want everything to migrate smoothly!

Julie

Julie Grob
Coordinator for Digital Projects & Instruction
Special Collections
University of Houston Libraries
713-743-9744
jgrob at uh.edu<mailto:jgrob at uh.edu>

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