[Archivesspace_Users_Group] Mrs. Husband's Name / updates in our ArchivesSpace database

Kevin W. Schlottmann kws2126 at columbia.edu
Tue May 19 16:40:14 EDT 2020


Hi Mark,

Indeed; to your point of having the data available, we publish our HTML
finding aids from EAD, so we have a cache of all EADs that is updated
nightly with any deltas.  So it's an easy and up-to-date data source for me
to turn to.

We turned up over 6,000 unittitles with the string 'Mrs', although some of
them will need no remediation (e.g., Mrs Doubtfire -- a unittitle from a
movie reviewer's collection.)

Kevin

On Tue, May 19, 2020 at 4:08 PM Custer, Mark <mark.custer at yale.edu> wrote:

> Kevin,
>
>
>
> I love that approach!  Much cleaner to write those queries against the
> EAD/EAC exports than having to do all of the table joins directly on the
> database.  Of course, it does require having all of that data exported from
> ArchivesSpace, but that’s already a good goal to have to share your
> description with services like ArchiveGrid, etc. 😊
>
>
>
> To partially answer your question Lara, the database query that I shared
> previously will export bioghist notes that are attached to agent records,
> but it keeps those notes in the format of the ArchivesSpace JSON records.
> Good to have in the reports to eyeball, at least, but not something that
> you’d want to edit directly.  Here’s an example, which gets stuffed into a
> single cell in our report:
>
>
>
> {
>     "jsonmodel_type": "note_bioghist",
>     "subnotes": [
>         {
>             "jsonmodel_type": "note_text",
>             "content": "English stage actor.",
>             "publish": true,
>             "subnote_guid": "7e7523151fa57827315ceb1772346741"
>         }
>     ],
>     "persistent_id": "497d3dd4284731aa1331eac06928d10a"
> }
>
>
>
> Of course, you could further process that output, or grab the contents of
> the note directly with an API query, etc.   But as Blake mentioned, I don’t
> think that any of the built-in reports include those notes right now since
> it does require extra processing to make the notes human readable.   But
> ASpace already includes a lot of code to do just that…  I just don’t know
> if any of the current reports tap into that.  The previous reporting system
> in ArchivesSpace, which used Jasper Reports, had an option to easily get
> those notes out and add them to the reports (e.g. that big blog above would
> become “English stage actor”), but even that wouldn’t take any EAD tags
> that might be present and convert those to something else.
>
>
>
> Kevin, your sample reports also include searching across unit titles in a
> finding aid, which is another great use case.  I’m afraid to see how many
> we have of those, but we should definitely look.  I know we’ve got quite a
> few, like
> https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/11/archival_objects/526696, which
> I’ve been meaning to update for quite some time.  In that case, though, my
> thought was just to add a new agent heading for
> http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/no93005770, which I hope would make
> it clear what’s going on / not also require updating folder labels and the
> like…  that said, I’d be curious if folks are doing that, too.
>
>
>
> Mark
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org [mailto:
> archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org] *On Behalf Of *Kevin
> W. Schlottmann
> *Sent:* Tuesday, 19 May, 2020 3:10 PM
> *To:* Archivesspace Users Group <
> archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org>
> *Subject:* Re: [Archivesspace_Users_Group] Mrs. Husband's Name / updates
> in our ArchivesSpace database
>
>
>
> Hi all,
>
>
>
> As an alternative to direct database access to run these sorts of queries,
> one could download the data as EAD, load it into a local XML database such
> as BaseX, and run queries using xquery there.  (I wrote a couple of quick
> queries and posted them here:
> https://gist.github.com/kschlottmann/4c7a3125780c18cd175a29c9ba237928) I
> put the results into a Google sheet for distributed review by our team.  If
> we have suggested updates to the free-text description (scope notes and
> unit titles), we'll note that in the Google sheet and then run those back
> in with the API.
>
>
>
> This approach obviously technical preconditions as well, including an API
> or OAI script that will download the EADs en masse and a script that will
> write the updates back in, but it can be done in a hosted environment where
> one doesn't have database access.
>
>
>
> Kevin
>
>
>
> On Tue, May 19, 2020 at 10:27 AM Karen Miller <k-miller3 at northwestern.edu>
> wrote:
>
> Good morning.
>
>
>
> At Northwestern University, our ArchivesSpace is hosted by Atlas, who has
> given us ODBC read-only access to the MySQL database. Just yesterday I ran
> a report that harvests BiogHist notes from Agents for a cleanup project. My
> SQL is pretty hacky too (although Mark’s is a good bit more neat looking
> than mine!), but I could post it on GitHub if it’s of interest.
>
>
>
> Karen
>
>
>
> *Karen D. Miller*
>
> Monographic Cataloger/Metadata Specialist
>
> Northwestern University Libraries
>
> Northwestern University
>
> 1970 Campus Drive
>
> Evanston, IL 60208
>
> www.library.northwestern.edu
>
> k-miller3 at northwestern.edu
>
> 874.467.3462
>
>
>
> *From:* archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org <
> archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org> *On Behalf Of *Lara
> Friedman-Shedlov
> *Sent:* Monday, May 18, 2020 4:07 PM
> *To:* Archivesspace Users Group <
> archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org>
> *Subject:* Re: [Archivesspace_Users_Group] Mrs. Husband's Name / updates
> in our ArchivesSpace database
>
>
>
> Thanks for sharing this Mark.  At the University of Minnesota, we are in
> the early stages of doing some agent record clean-up as well, so this
> information is very useful.
>
>
>
> For one project we were looking at doing with our agents, we wanted to
> create a report of all of our agent records that would also include the
> biographical /historical notes from any linked resource records (or at
> least the URLs to any associated resource records, so we could easily find
> the relevant bio/hist notes).  Our instance of ArchivesSpace is hosted by
> Lyrasis so we contacted them to ask about it and were told this is "not
> possible."  I found that surprising and wonder if anyone else has done
> something like this and if so, how.
>
>
>
> / Lara Friedman-Shedlov
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, May 18, 2020 at 4:00 PM Custer, Mark <mark.custer at yale.edu> wrote:
>
> All,
>
>
>
> Is anyone else working on Agent-related cleanup projects in ArchivesSpace
> right now?  We’ve got a couple of those going on at Yale, and I wanted to
> mention one of them on this listserv since I said that I would last night
> on Twitter 😊.  My reasoning was that it would be better to share widely,
> even early on, in the likely event that others were working on similar
> projects, and in hopes that it might save time for anyone else looking to
> get started with such a project.
>
>
>
> Anyhow, just for the sake of sharing, here’s a really hacky SQL database
> query that you can use in ArchivesSpace to get a list of agents that have
> any name forms that include “Mrs.” or “Miss”:
> https://gist.github.com/fordmadox/d78656fceb04b62000b662a3f2464488
>
>
>
> A few caveats:
>
>    - I do **not** know SQL very well, so I know that this could be
>    improved dramatically, but it gets data out of ArchivesSpace.
>    - The query casts a rather wide net, since it looks for Mrs. or Miss
>    in any of the name forms, but it could be altered to just look for those
>    two terms in the “sort_name” only if desired.
>    - The result of the query has at least one Yale-specific field in
>    there, since we store our local ILS bibliographic IDs in ASpace’s “user
>    defined string 2” field.  You can ignore that, or add something else, etc.,
>    but the gist is that this query should work in any ASpace instance.  It
>    should return one row per agent, with multiple name forms, and a bit more
>    information like which Resources, Archival Objects, and/or Accessions the
>    agent is linked to.
>    - And last, it just searches for variations of “Mrs.” and “Miss”,
>    which works for our dataset, but you could modify the HAVING clause at the
>    end of the query to search for other honorific terms, if needed.
>
>
>
> Most importantly, though, getting a dataset to review and act on is just
> the first step.  The hard work comes next!  Jessica Tai, Alison Clemens,
> and Karen Spicher are spearheading this project at Yale. If anyone has
> specific questions about the project, I’d encourage you to reach out
> directly to them.
>
>
>
> For now, though, here’s one interesting example from the project:   we’ve
> got an agent record now in ArchivesSpace for “Brady, John G., Mrs.”,
> https://archives.yale.edu/agents/people/77599.  Originally this would
> just have been text in the finding aid, later a link in a catalog record,
> and now it’s full-blown, standalone record for a person in ArchivesSpace.
> But nowhere in that agent record is her given name, Elizabeth, although her
> name is thankfully listed multiple times in the finding aid (check out the
> finding aid author! 😊), in the Wikipedia entry for John Green Brady, and
> elsewhere.  So, that agent record will eventually be one of a few hundred
> local records that we update in ArchivesSpace during the course of this
> project.  And, one of the things that I like about ArchivesSpace --which
> helps to make sure that this project is possible without too many
> workarounds--  is that even if an agent record has a corresponding
> authority record in, say, the Library of Congress name authority file (e.g.
> http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n2008076910), you can still choose to
> use a different name variant for that agent’s display name, rather than an
> authorized heading.
>
>
>
> Anyhow, I hope all is doing well!
>
>
>
> Mark
>
>
>
>
>
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>
>
>
> --
>
> Lara D. Friedman-Shedlov    (she, her, hers)
>
> Description and Access Archivist | Kautz Family YMCA Archives |
> www.lib.umn.edu/ymca
>
> Digital Records Archivist | Archives & Special Collections |
> www.lib.umn.edu/special
>
> University of Minnesota Libraries | lib.umn.edu | 612.626.7972
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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>
>
> --
>
> Kevin Schlottmann
> Head of Archives Processing
> Rare Book & Manuscript Library
> Butler Library, Room 801
> Columbia University
> 535 W. 114th St., New York, NY  10027
> (212) 854-8483
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-- 
Kevin Schlottmann
Head of Archives Processing
Rare Book & Manuscript Library
Butler Library, Room 801
Columbia University
535 W. 114th St., New York, NY  10027
(212) 854-8483
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