[Archivesspace_Users_Group] Formatting Agents and Subjects

[Hand, Sarit]

Hello,

I'll apologize in advance for the chaos I am unleashing here. I am working on a project migrating an old access database collection listing to ASpace. There is a lot of subject and agent cleanup, most of which I have done. I am now trying to identify what is already in ASpace so I can use the URIs in the bulk importer. However, I am finding that our subjects and agents in ASpace were not uniformly created, so, a) finding matches is difficult, b) I'd like to clean up the records in ASpace and after all that, c) I need to get the collection uploaded, subjects, agents and all.

I have questions I need help on, either, how to... or confirming what I think I know:

  1.  To my knowledge, there is no bulk updater for subjects and/or agents. I do not use the API, as I have not had the time to dive in like I have been wanting to. Am I missing a way to do this via the SUI?
  2.  Our agents have not displayed dates. I just edited one agent name and found there had been dates entered. When I saved the record, the dates suddenly appeared, however, the dates appear in parenthesis, not with a comma as found in LOC. I.e., Smith, John, 1967-2014, instead I get Smith, John (1967-2014). What am I missing? Can this be changed?
  3.  If I recall correctly, if I do a bulk importer including all the subjects and agents, the system will not identify duplicates and will instead create a new record unless I have the ID and use that instead of text. Do I have that correct?
  4.  I've not delved too deep into Subjects and Agents in ASpace other than very basic stuff so I am unsure how to handle subjects that start with an agent name and has subject qualifiers, would that be a subject, or an agent? i.e. Smith, John, 1967-2014 -- pictorial works

Last but not least (and I could probably ask a million more questions)
With over a thousand new terms to be attached to almost a thousand archival object records, would I be better off first bulk importing the subjects and agents and then bulk importing the collection and link terms later? How would you handle this part?

Thank you for taking the time to read this, advise and/or answer my questions.

Cheers,
[cid:image001.png at 01DA0354.01590B80]                                              [cid:image002.jpg at 01DA0354.01590B80]
Sarit Hand                                                       200 Liberty St.
Digital Archivist                                               New York, NY 10281
Corporate Archives                                         T 212.621.7035


shand at ap.org
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