[Archivesspace_Users_Group] Different subjects with identical labels
Olivia S Solis
livsolis at utexas.edu
Thu Aug 16 10:47:37 EDT 2018
Hello all,
I wrote to the group a year ago about my ASpace issues using GeoNames
<http://www.geonames.org> as controlled our vocabulary source as we would
like to for a number of reasons. The crux of the issue spelled out more
verbosely in my original email below is that ASpace will not let me use an
identical subject term in the same subject type, as is GeoNames' practice.
(e.g. There are 7 towns/cities of Salem in Texas
<http://www.geonames.org/advanced-search.html?q=salem%2C+texas&country=&featureClass=P&continentCode=>!)
Steve Majewski kindly suggested using subdivisions to differentiate the
terms, which does allow for me to enter the subjects in ASpace. This is
what I was doing but, I am dissatisfied with this solution for a number of
reasons.
1. I feel like I can't claim to be using GeoNames in good faith if I
change GeoNames' lexical label.
2. It requires more maintenance (deciding and implementing which broader
terms to use based on individual geographic location feature types,
differentiation needs and updating them as appropriate). One advantage of
the URI should be that you can just make an API call to grab a term's
current label. Fun fact... Macedonia
<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/17/world/europe/greece-macedonia-name-dispute.html>
just changed its name last month! If I had to change "Macedonia" to "North
Macedonia" in all terms it appeared in, it adds a lot more work.
3. Sharing Geographic terms between ASpace and our digital repository
(separate from ASpace) because a bigger challenge.
After talking with our Digital Collections Services team, we've decided to
go with taking an approach similar to IMDB:
[image: Screen Shot 2018-08-16 at 9.25.00 AM.png]
[image: Screen Shot 2018-08-16 at 9.27.02 AM.png]
and add a roman numeral suffix surrounded by parens to the end of the
geographic term if it repeats. We're still deviating from the GeoNames
terms slightly. But "Salem (V)" much less of a deviation from the GeoNames
term of "Salem" than "Salem -- Bastrop County -- Texas" plus it
communicates to the researcher that they may want to check out all the
other Salems in our ASpace instance since there are at least 5. We plan to
customize the PUI to display a clickable URI with the term for context.
I was wondering if anyone else is using GeoNames or has a similar
situation... a controlled vocabulary category you want to use allows for
identical terms within a subject type, but ASpace does not. If so, what
have some of your solutions been if so?
Thanks,
Olivia
On Wed, Jul 5, 2017 at 8:48 PM Majewski, Steven Dennis (sdm7g) <
sdm7g at eservices.virginia.edu> wrote:
> I think you need to use Texas or France as subdivisions of the subject.
> The scope note is just a note/comment for documentation, and doesn’t
> distinguish the two subjects as being different. If you encode it like
> this, it will allow both “Paris — France” and “Paris — Texas” . Will this
> work for you ? — Steve Majewski / UVA
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Jul 5, 2017, at 1:32 PM, Olivia S Solis <livsolis at utexas.edu> wrote:
>
> Hello all,
>
> I am not sure how many ASpace users out there share the most recent issue
> I have encountered migrating data to ArchivesSpace. For a number of
> reasons, the Briscoe Center has decided to go with GeoNames as our
> canonical controlled vocabulary for subject/geographical terms. This is a
> recent adoption and much of the legacy EAD we use goes with Library of
> Congress Geographic terms, which we are mapping to GeoNames. We are using
> Islandora for our digital repository for item-level description. i.e. We're
> using the MODS hierarchicalGeographic
> <https://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/userguide/subject.html#hierarchicalgeographic> element,
> which works well with GeoNames because GeoNames also uses a hierarchical
> system to classify its terms. So for individual MODS records for digital
> objects you can do something like city: "Paris", country: "France" for one
> record vs city: "Paris", state: "Texas" in another. There would be two
> instances of "Paris" in our cities taxonomies, distinguished from each
> other by their broader terms and associated URIs. There is no
> disambiguating information in the labels themselves. The difference between
> the cities in records is given by the broader state or country elements
> plus URIs.
>
> That works great for item-level description, but causes a number of
> problems for collection level description in ArchivesSpace.
>
> 1. It appears that ArchivesSpace won't let me create a subject of the
> same type (e.g. Geographic) from the same source (e.g. GeoNames) that has a
> label identical to another term classified with the same type/source.
> 2. Just for the sake of experimentation in our ASpace sandbox, I
> identified one of my "Paris" records as a cultural context term. It was
> difficult to know the difference between the two when I tried to apply the
> subject to a resource record. The autocomplete feature did not include any
> disambiguating information (e.g. from the Scope field or the identifier
> field in the subject records). The browser headers in the "Browse" subjects
> link don't include the Scope note either.
> 3. Even if I could create two GeoNames geographical subjects with the
> label "Paris", I'm not sure how to communicate to the ASpace end user the
> difference between the cities when they are applied to records. I can add
> notes in the "Scope" field for each subject record -- "France" and "Texas"
> -- to communicate the info, but the scope field for the terms doesn't
> appear in e.g. a resource record's linked subject.
> 4. Even if we apply the correct label, the human-readable
> disambiguating information ("Texas" vs. "France") won't export to our EAD
> and our end users might get confused about which Paris we mean, especially
> if there happens to be a collection with both the Paris in Texas and the
> Paris in France. In such a case would we include the two different "Paris"
> subjects plus "France" and "Texas"? Again, this illustrates a difference in
> item vs. collection-level description. We publish our EAD via a consortial
> regional portal hosted by the University of Texas, TARO, which is how
> researchers view our finding aids online. It's possible we'll open up the
> public interface, but we're not there yet.
>
> Has anyone else encountered these problems? I'm sure there is a
> solution/numerous possible solutions to the problems above, though it might
> mean altering the GeoNames label in ArchivesSpace to include the
> disambiguating information. Not exactly kosher if we say we're using
> GeoNames terms, but we might have to. We want to use the same controlled
> vocabulary terms regardless of system for global consistency, ease of
> maintenance etc. I can imagine a kind of customization where our EAD
> exporter could grab, e.g. the "Scope" field with the broader term's label
> and append it to the label for, in this example "Paris", surrounded by
> parentheses. But that presumes we can enter two different
> GeoNames/geographical terms "Paris".
>
> See screen shots with fake data. FYI, we are on ASpace version 1.5.3.
>
> Thanks, and hopefully I'm not the only one with this problem!
>
> -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
> <Screen Shot 2017-07-05 at 11.35.49 AM.png><Screen Shot 2017-07-05 at
> 11.32.47 AM.png><Screen Shot 2017-07-05 at 11.42.54 AM.png><Screen Shot
> 2017-07-05 at 11.42.37 AM.png>
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--
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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