[Archivesspace_Users_Group] invalid EAD exported

Thu Jun 15 15:35:42 EDT 2017

FYI: I’ve been finding a number of cases of ArchivesSpace ( 2.x ) producing invalid EAD on export. 
In these cases, and element with a <head> but no other content is produced. 

In a couple of cases, the cause was that a note was marked as published, but someone missed clicking publish on the sub note with the text. 

In another case, the ArchivesSpace resource was created by importing EAD which had nested <bibliography> elements:

	<bibliography><head>Bibliography</head>
	<bibliography><head>Print Sources</head>
		<bibref> … </bibref>
	<bibliography><head>Electronic Sources</head>
		<bibref> … </bibref>
	</bibliography>

On import, ArchivesSpace created 3 separate bibliographic notes, one of them empty. 
On export, this serialized as 3 un-nested <bibliography> elements, one of them empty, which cause the validation error. 

It might be simple to make the exporter skip serializing content-less notes, however that would make the first case of inadvertently not publishing all of the sub notes harder to notice. And not sure if you can always safely assume that published notes should imply publish all sub-notes.  Can you think of any counter instances ? 

Another possible way to handle this might be to incorporate validation as a last step in export, and if there are errors, display them on the redirected download page. Then you will know upfront to review your resource again and where to look for issues. 

— Steve Majewski 