[Archivesspace_Users_Group] Question about Agent Records

[Custer, Mark]

Gwen,

You’ve definitely found a bug!

In the meantime, if you’re only using the date expression field within a Dates of Existence subrecord, I don’t think that I’d recommend using that record type to store that date.  I believe that the Dates of Existence records are primarily there to map to the “special coded dates” in a MARC authority record (see https://www.loc.gov/marc/authority/ad046.html).   What type of date are you recording in this part of the agent record?

Regardless, the current behavior in the application is a bug that needs to be fixed!!!   I took a closer look, and it appears that this is due to an issue with the metadata mappings in the HTML head section of the PUI.  There are a couple of ways to fix this bug:


  *   Change this line, https://github.com/archivesspace/archivesspace/blob/master/public/app/models/agent_person.rb#L14, to md[‘birthDate’] = dates[‘begin’] if dates[‘begin’].  I think I like this approach the most since it’s explicit that there’s no birth date when one isn’t set.
  *   That line never would’ve been a problem, though, until I changed this line, https://github.com/archivesspace/archivesspace/blob/master/public/app/models/agent_person.rb#L78, from just “md” to being md.delete_if { |key,value| value.empty?}.  The problem there arises when the metadata record comes in with a value of md[‘birthDate’] = nil.  So, maybe the safest way to fix this, and still keep the resulting metadata clean, would be to change line 78 to md.compact.delete_if { |key,value| value.empty? } .  In that case, the previous section that calls the compact method wouldn’t be needed.

Thanks for pointing out this issue!  It’s something that will need to be patched for each of the agent records.

Mark



From: archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org [mailto:archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org] On Behalf Of Gwenlyn Coddington
Sent: Monday, 16 December, 2019 3:26 PM
To: Archivesspace Users Group <archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org>
Subject: Re: [Archivesspace_Users_Group] Question about Agent Records

Hi Maura,

Thank you so much for the suggestion. I will coordinate with our I.T. Department to see if we can’t figure out exactly what the error is.

Thanks again,
Gwen

Gwenlyn Coddington
College Archivist & Special Collections Librarian
McDaniel Hoover Library
gcoddington at mcdaniel.edu<mailto:gcoddington at mcdaniel.edu>
(410) 857-2793

From: archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org<mailto:archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org> <archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org<mailto:archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org>> On Behalf Of Carbone, Maura
Sent: Monday, December 16, 2019 3:11 PM
To: archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org<mailto:archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org>
Subject: Re: [Archivesspace_Users_Group] Question about Agent Records

Hi,

To look at the logs requires someone with server access – not sure if you are hosted by Lyrasis or hosted by your IT department but if you can recreate the error and note the time you could send them a screen shot and an approximate time (‘this happened to me at 2:30 pm today’) and they can access the logs and look for errors in there. I’m not familiar with 2.7.0 so I don’t know what date requirements there are.

Best,
Maura

From: <archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org<mailto:archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org>> on behalf of Gwenlyn Coddington <gcoddington at mcdaniel.edu<mailto:gcoddington at mcdaniel.edu>>
Reply-To: Archivesspace Users Group <archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org<mailto:archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org>>
Date: Monday, December 16, 2019 at 2:41 PM
To: Archivesspace Users Group <archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org<mailto:archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org>>
Subject: Re: [Archivesspace_Users_Group] Question about Agent Records

Hi Mark,

Thanks for your help! We recently upgraded to v 2.7.0.

I tried resaving the record as you suggested and unfortunately that did not clear it up. I also found this problem in the Sandbox Demo as I was trying to recreate what was happening in our system: entering the date in the expression field rather than a normalized begin and end date gave the same error response in the PUI but it cleared up when I switched to the begin and end fields. So I guess I know how to fix it but I want to know why its rejecting dates in the Expression field.

Thanks again,
Gwen

Gwenlyn Coddington
College Archivist & Special Collections Librarian
McDaniel Hoover Library
gcoddington at mcdaniel.edu<mailto:gcoddington at mcdaniel.edu>
(410) 857-2793

From: archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org<mailto:archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org> <archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org<mailto:archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org>> On Behalf Of Custer, Mark
Sent: Monday, December 16, 2019 2:31 PM
To: Archivesspace Users Group <archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org<mailto:archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org>>
Subject: Re: [Archivesspace_Users_Group] Question about Agent Records

Gwen,

Which version of ArchivesSpace are you on?

Here’s an example of an agent record in the PUI that uses both the Dates of Existence subrecord (for specific birth and death dates) aas the date field in the Names subrecord:  https://archives.yale.edu/agents/people/81438

Also, have you tried to just re-save the agent record and see if that clears things up?  Usually when you get the “We’re sorry, but something went wrong message”, the issues generally has to do with the index.

Mark



From: archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org<mailto:archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org> [mailto:archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org] On Behalf Of Gwenlyn Coddington
Sent: Monday, 16 December, 2019 11:24 AM
To: Archivesspace Users Group <archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org<mailto:archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org>>
Subject: Re: [Archivesspace_Users_Group] Question about Agent Records

Hi Maura,

Thank you so much for responding to my question. Unfortunately, I do not know how to examine the logs for errors.

Gwen

Gwenlyn Coddington
College Archivist & Special Collections Librarian
McDaniel Hoover Library
gcoddington at mcdaniel.edu<mailto:gcoddington at mcdaniel.edu>
(410) 857-2793

From: archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org<mailto:archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org> <archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org<mailto:archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org>> On Behalf Of Carbone, Maura
Sent: Monday, December 16, 2019 10:57 AM
To: Archivesspace Users Group <archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org<mailto:archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org>>
Subject: Re: [Archivesspace_Users_Group] Question about Agent Records

Hi,

Are you able to look at the logs and see what error is being returned there?

Best,
Maura

From: <archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org<mailto:archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org>> on behalf of Gwenlyn Coddington <gcoddington at mcdaniel.edu<mailto:gcoddington at mcdaniel.edu>>
Reply-To: Archivesspace Users Group <archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org<mailto:archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org>>
Date: Monday, December 16, 2019 at 10:30 AM
To: "archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org<mailto:archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org>" <archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org<mailto:archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org>>
Subject: [Archivesspace_Users_Group] Question about Agent Records

Hello,

I am new to ArchivesSpace and was hoping some of the more experienced users might be able to shed some light on a problem we are having with our Agent Records.  Many of our Agent Records with date expressions are not displaying properly in the Public Interface.  When you go to click on the individual record, it returns an error message (“We’re sorry, but something went wrong”). All these records appear to use the Dates of Existence Expression field rather than the normalized Begin and End fields. Agent Records without dates appear to be displaying correctly. Has anyone else come across this problem?

Thanks for your time,
Gwen Coddington

Gwenlyn Coddington
College Archivist & Special Collections Librarian
McDaniel Hoover Library
gcoddington at mcdaniel.edu<mailto:gcoddington at mcdaniel.edu>
(410) 857-2793

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