[Archivesspace_Users_Group] EAD Import questions

[Chris Fitzpatrick]

Hi Patrick,


In regards to the import error, there should be error information following that inital "!!! Import Error !!!" block. Was there anything?

b,chris.


Chris Fitzpatrick | Developer, ArchivesSpace
Skype: chrisfitzpat  | Phone: 918.236.6048
http://archivesspace.org/
________________________________
From: archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org <archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org> on behalf of Custer, Mark <mark.custer at yale.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, October 07, 2014 9:12 PM
To: Archivesspace Users Group
Subject: Re: [Archivesspace_Users_Group] EAD Import questions

Hi, all.

Interesting stuff, Patrick.  I haven't had a chance to test out the new release candidate, but I hope to do that later this week.

I should note, though, that I was somewhat mistaken in my previous comment when I said that there was no way to group instances any longer.  You can group the container elements if you rely on the @label attribute, which *should* only occur at the beginning of each container group.  This practice depends on the EAD always being serialized in the correct document order, however, so this process is definitely not as fool proof as using the @id and @parent attributes, which follows the AT model (and the examples in the EAD 2002 tag library).   I didn't  think about using @label earlier, but I later realized that that's how the ArchivesSpace XSLT style sheets performs the container grouping (here's a snippet from one of those style sheets:  <xsl:for-each-group select="ead:did/ead:container" group-starting-with=".[@label]">).  I'd certainly not prefer to rely upon the document order, though, if at all possible.  Plus, IDs are much cooler!

All of that said, even though the AT could export these container groups correctly, you could not import those groups back into the AT database -- which, once again, essentially negated the option to assign multiple instances to a single level of description if you ever needed to export and re-import your data!  I hope that ArchivesSpace will also fix this glaring issue, since I would definitely like to encourage the local practice of assigning multiple instances to a single level of description when appropriate (rather than describing things in multiple places in the finding aid, if the description really doesn't warrant that duplication).

Mark



From: archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org [mailto:archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org] On Behalf Of Galligan, Patrick
Sent: Tuesday, October 07, 2014 2:35 PM
To: Archivesspace Users Group
Subject: [Archivesspace_Users_Group] EAD Import questions

I've been playing around with the newest release candidate and I just had a couple of quick questions:


1.       A while back Mark Custer identified: "@id and @parent are not included on container elements in the EAD export, but they were with the AT. There is NO way to group instances any longer once an EAD file is created. This is a problem if we want to use multiple instances at any one level of description." This issue is happening with EAD import as well, and causes problems when you export ead from AT and try to import it to AS. When a component has multiple instances AS tries to merge all of those instances into a single one. This is still happening on the latest release candidate. Is this on your guys' radar?

2.       In a recent EAD test I exported EAD from AT and imported it into AS. According to the import log, AS finished step 5 (Cleaning) but failed and threw this up:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!



IMPORT ERROR:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What is the system trying to tell me here?

Patrick Galligan
Rockefeller Archive Center
Assistant Digital Archivist
914-366-6386

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