[Archivesspace_Users_Group] question related to AT migration tool update - locations attached to accessions

[Christine Di Bella]

Hello ArchivesSpace members,

As mentioned in last week's monthly update, Georgia Tech co-op student Sarah Morrissey is working closely with Laney on various projects, including an update to the Archivists' Toolkit migration tool, to be followed soon afterward by an update to the Archon tool. The aim is to make it possible to migrate data from the last version of each of these systems into the current version of ArchivesSpace. (Currently migration is only supported through ArchivesSpace 1.4.2 and then users must upgrade to later versions of ArchivesSpace from there.) We're really excited about this update but we need your insight to move forward.

As you may imagine, one of the more complex pieces of the update is mapping container information from Toolkit to the ArchivesSpace container model. One discrepancy we have found is that Toolkit allowed locations to be linked directly to accessions, with no intervening instances or containers. In ArchivesSpace locations have to be linked to a top container, which is in turn linked to an instance. So locations that were attached directly to accessions in Toolkit need to be translated into instance records, and now into instances with top containers, and then attached to the top container.

We're curious how people who used locations with accessions in Toolkit have translated this data into ArchivesSpace to this point. Sarah is analyzing whether there is any way to determine what top containers should be created when, due to the use of locations, there seem to be implied containers linked to accessions. One top container per location? We are thinking the indicator would be something like the accession number plus the location with a sequential "unknown container" or similar. Does anyone have a better suggestion, or want to voice support for that idea?

We see there's also an optional Note/Container Information field that is part of the linking information that may be useful in some cases in determining container information, but since it's optional, it wouldn't be there in all cases, and even, if data is present, it may not always provide information that could be used to determine the appropriate top container data. If you used locations with accessions in AT, did you use this note field to record such information? Could it be parsed out into useful container type or indicator information?

Thanks for any suggestions and feedback you can provide. And looking ahead to the update of the Archon migration tool, if you have any suggestions for identifying top containers from Archon data, we'd be very interested to have them.

Christine

Christine Di Bella
ArchivesSpace Program Manager
christine.dibella at lyrasis.org<mailto:christine.dibella at lyrasis.org>
800.999.8558 x2905
678-235-2905
cdibella13 (Skype)

[ASpaceOrgHomeMedium]

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lyralists.lyrasis.org/pipermail/archivesspace_users_group/attachments/20170927/5095c813/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image003.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 6608 bytes
Desc: image003.jpg
URL: <http://lyralists.lyrasis.org/pipermail/archivesspace_users_group/attachments/20170927/5095c813/attachment.jpg>