[Archivesspace_Users_Group] Discontinuing use of "levels of description" labels?

[Jordon Steele]

Hi all,

This is more of an archival description question, but I'm not a member of that listserv, so I figured it would be easier to ping some of you about this for advice since I wager there's a lot of overlap.

We have not-infrequent discussions around here about what "level of description" label to assign to an archival component at a given level, i.e. collection, series, file, item, etc. But because our data is already structured in hierarchical relationships via EAD/JSON, there's no real need to "tell the computer" what level this is since these labels aren't the way computers understand context and hierarchy, the nesting of data is.

Once I realized this, I often made the case that these level-of-description labels are useful for stylesheets, i.e. tell a stylesheet with level=series to make it all caps and bold, level=file should be red, etc. But the ASpace PUI doesn't/doesn't need to style levels in this manner for the hierarchy to be easily understood.

So we're considering discontinuing use of the "level of description" field in ASpace. But am I missing an important value of this field? Thanks!

Best,

Jordon

Jordon Steele
Hodson Curator of the University Archives
Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
3400 N Charles St
Baltimore, MD 21218
jsteele at jhu.edu<mailto:jsteele at jhu.edu>
410-516-5493
he/him/his

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