[Archivesspace_Users_Group] Staff users/agents as subjects/creators

[Olivia S Solis]

Hello all,

I was wondering if some of you have a situation we have. Occasionally, some
of our staff will appear as subjects/creators in resources and accessions.
We have some staff members who are published scholars and appear in name
authority files. In such cases, we'd want to use the URIs for those names
(no such field in user records). We also have specific rules we follow for
local names for subjects/creators.

How do you/do you distinguish between staff members when they are acting in
their capacity as staff (e.g. as the recipient of the agreement received
event) vs. as subject/creator? Staff users appear to be agents that are
selectable in any kind of record type.

Our current strategy is to include a "(staff)" addition to "Full name" for
users. For instance, mine would be "Olivia Solis (staff)", the reason being
to make it absolutely clear this is not the non-existent "Solis, Olivia" in
VIAF who is also an agent, but not a user. I don't like including
information that is not part of a name in the name field, but otherwise, I
think people would accidentally select the user agent in instances where
they should select e.g. the VIAF "Solis, Olivia" with a URI we want to use.
Is there a better solution to "staff" for disambiguation purposes? Somehow
display the person's title in the type-ahead list that appears when you
start typing in a linked agent name? I'm not sure how difficult that would
be.

We plan to retire (change passwords for), but not delete staff user
accounts when the staff members no longer work here so we don't get rid of
their data trail. But in 20 years it would be nice for staff to know that
the retired "Olivia Solis (staff)" is also the same person as creator of
one of our collections. Or maybe a donor, in which case I would not want to
use the user account.

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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