[Archivesspace_Users_Group] Digital Objects – examples of ASpace records + repository objects?

[McKeehan, Morgan]

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for examples of how other institutions have handled relationships between ASpace records and digital repository content, in cases when the physical arrangement vs. intellectual arrangement poses object-modeling challenges for digitized representations.

For example, in your systems do you have scenarios when an ASpace archival object record may have many ASpace digital object (DO) records linked to it, with each DO record corresponding to an individual object in your digital repository system? Conversely, perhaps there are also  situations where a single digital repository object contains files/digitized pages that are described by separate archival object records – ie, a folder of stuff that was digitized as one grouping, but actually corresponds to more than one individual descriptive component?

At my institution, we’re working through these issues as we’re migrating our digitized materials to a new digital repository system at the same time as we’re also migrating our finding aids/archival data to ASpace. We would welcome any examples that others can share, in case you may have approaches from what has worked well, or lessons learned about what to avoid.

Please also feel free to message me off-list if more context or clarification about what I’m asking would be helpful. I’m happy to discuss more about our workflows and object modeling plans so far.

I’d also be happy to set up a zoom call if anyone has examples to share that it would be easier to walk through via zoom. I totally understand there may be examples that just seem too complicated to try to explain in an email!

Here's a little more explanation about the kinds of linking situations I’m asking about:

In our new digital repository, we plan to model digitized materials as repository objects based on the physical containers. For example, all digitized pages from a folder of correspondence would equal 1 repository object (a “Work”). The URL of the repository object will provide the File Version value for an ASpace Digital Object record, and that DO record will be linked to the relevant archival object record that contains the description for the original materials.

In cases such as a grouping of documents that is housed in a range of physical folders, this will mean many DO records linked to an archival object record. A common scenario is something like: a descriptive component with Title: “Correspondence, 1800”, housed in “Folders 65-75”. This arrangement will give us 11 DO records linked to the “Correspondence, 1800” archival object record. In many cases, folder ranges will be even larger, so there could easily be 20-30 or more DO records linked to an AO record. However, if we instead modeled all scans from Folders 65-75 as 1 object in our digital repository, since each folder contains 100+ pages, that arrangement would be a large and cumbersome repository object for users to navigate. Neither option seems great. We’re interested in learning about how others handle these types of situations!

Thanks for any examples or insights you can share,

Morgan

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Morgan McKeehan (she/her/hers)
Digital Collections Specialist
University Libraries
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
morganem at email.unc.edu
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