[Archivesspace_Users_Group] Former users and data loss

[Brian Thomas]

I haven’t come across this problem as yet (still working out implementation issues), but have you tried creating a dummy agent record for your defunct user, merging your actual user with said dummy user, then deleting the user info from the system? There is a similar situation with some flavors of drupal/wordpress and the workaround for that is to modify the user info such that the previous employee has no way of logging in, such as changing the login email address/password.

From: archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org [mailto:archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org] On Behalf Of Olivia S Solis
Sent: Tuesday, March 07, 2017 6:02 PM
To: archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org
Subject: [Archivesspace_Users_Group] Former users and data loss

Hello all,

The Briscoe Center is in the process of adopting ArchivesSpace and has been testing it out in a sandbox. We took note of a potential problem in the future regarding hypothetical former employees who may have been ASpace users at one point. Presumably, we would delete them after they moved on to other work. I wanted to see what a user's trail might look like after he/she were deleted from the system, so I created an appraisal event with a user (my dog Chicken) as the authorizer.

The results are mixed. While in some fields it looks like the data is retained, in some fields it is not. For instance:

  *   In the Events Browser, the former employee/user appears as the authorizer and record creator
  *   Within the event itself, the agent link is blank
  *   In the resource record the event is linked to, the agent links field is empty, but the created and Last modified fields list the now deleted user
Before you delete an agent record, ArchivesSpace does warn you that you will lose all references to it in the database, including references to it in other records. How have some of you anticipated handling this situation? Leave former employees in the system and change their passwords? Is there a workaround for some of the loss of data or am I missing an obvious solution to this?

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
livsolis at utexas.edu<mailto:livsolis at utexas.edu>
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