Hi Olivia,

We have one agent record and assign different roles or relator terms based on 
the context. So for a given collection, Person X may have the role “Source” and 
relator “Curator” if that person was involved in acquiring a collection. If the 
person was the subject of the collection, we’d re-use the existing agent record 
and assign the role “Subject.” If we ended up getting that person’s papers, in 
that scenario, we’d assign the same agent record but with role “Creator.” We 
think of the agent one entity who may have different roles depending on the 
collection/event/context.

Best,

Jordon

Jordon Steele
Hodson Curator of the University Archives
Special Collections
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
3400 N Charles St
Baltimore, MD 21218
410-516-5493
jste...@jhu.edu

From: archivesspace_users_group-boun...@lyralists.lyrasis.org 
[mailto:archivesspace_users_group-boun...@lyralists.lyrasis.org] On Behalf Of 
Olivia S Solis
Sent: Thursday, January 04, 2018 3:05 PM
To: Archivesspace Users Group <archivesspace_users_group@lyralists.lyrasis.org>
Subject: [Archivesspace_Users_Group] Staff users/agents as subjects/creators

Hello all,

I was wondering if some of you have a situation we have. Occasionally, some of 
our staff will appear as subjects/creators in resources and accessions. We have 
some staff members who are published scholars and appear in name authority 
files. In such cases, we'd want to use the URIs for those names (no such field 
in user records). We also have specific rules we follow for local names for 
subjects/creators.

How do you/do you distinguish between staff members when they are acting in 
their capacity as staff (e.g. as the recipient of the agreement received event) 
vs. as subject/creator? Staff users appear to be agents that are selectable in 
any kind of record type.

Our current strategy is to include a "(staff)" addition to "Full name" for 
users. For instance, mine would be "Olivia Solis (staff)", the reason being to 
make it absolutely clear this is not the non-existent "Solis, Olivia" in VIAF 
who is also an agent, but not a user. I don't like including information that 
is not part of a name in the name field, but otherwise, I think people would 
accidentally select the user agent in instances where they should select e.g. 
the VIAF "Solis, Olivia" with a URI we want to use. Is there a better solution 
to "staff" for disambiguation purposes? Somehow display the person's title in 
the type-ahead list that appears when you start typing in a linked agent name? 
I'm not sure how difficult that would be.

We plan to retire (change passwords for), but not delete staff user accounts 
when the staff members no longer work here so we don't get rid of their data 
trail. But in 20 years it would be nice for staff to know that the retired 
"Olivia Solis (staff)" is also the same person as creator of one of our 
collections. Or maybe a donor, in which case I would not want to use the user 
account.

Thanks,
Olivia

--
Olivia Solis, MSIS
Metadata Coordinator
Dolph Briscoe Center for American History
The University of Texas at Austin
2300 Red River St. Stop D1100
Austin TX, 78712-1426
(512) 232-8013
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