[Archivesspace_Users_Group] location profiles + container profiles

[Olivia S Solis]

Hi all,

We at the Briscoe are in the thick of/near the end of migrating legacy data
and at long last adopting ArchivesSpace. It appears I had a
misunderstanding of how container profiles + location profiles could work
together.

I had assumed that when you assign all of your boxes/containers container
profiles and plot them to a location with a particular location profile
(i.e. dimensions) you would be able to identify shelves with free space.

After getting some of our data in the system/more monkeying with the
sandbox, I see this is not the case. You can identify shelves with no
containers (few and far between in our case). But you cannot see how much
space is available on a shelf with one or more containers. You can see that
the shelf has a number of top containers, but not how many inches remain on
a shelf given the range of sizes a top container can have.

Our institution is crammed to near maximum capacity. Currently for us,
processors can either spend time in the stacks scanning for minimal onsite
space to put their recently processed materials, some of which might be a
just couple of Hollingers, or just sent them to offsite storage.

This being the case I have some questions:

1) Am I just missing something obvious and ASpace can be used to identify
shelves with top containers with available space? Based on all
documentation I've read, I don't think so, but want a sanity check.
2) Are there any plans to implement location/container management
functionality so that container profiles can be used to calculate the space
remaining on a shelf with a location profile?
3) This brings up another issue for us. Sometimes, e.g., a bankers box  is
oriented on the shelf with the long side of the box running parallel with
the shelf edge, and other rarer cases the long side is perpendicular to it.
If container profile dimensions are used to calculate available shelf
space, it would seem I need two separate container profiles for the same
box, one for each orientation, each with inverse widths and depths. If not,
though, the box would get one profile. I looked at Yale's lovely
documentation
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DI_7YNZy-RcjQ9hpMMbxJEkHFpYndzmDoG3ylOc38BY/edit?usp=sharing>,
which for container profiles states, "Width is the edge of the container
that faces out on the shelf." Without the application of container profiles
being used to calculate available shelf space, just extents, why would this
matter? (Again, the issue might be that I am missing something. See point
1).

Thanks!
Olivia
-- 
Olivia Solis, MSIS
Metadata Coordinator
Dolph Briscoe Center for American History
The University of Texas at Austin
2300 Red River St. Stop D1100
Austin TX, 78712-1426
(512) 232-8013
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