Hello all, I was wondering if any institutions out there completely manage your containers in ArchivesSpace, and if so, how is that going for you? Have you put any checks in place to ensure that all boxes are located, not deleted, not duplicated?
Our situation is that we currently maintain spreadsheets of shelf lists with all our boxes outside of ASpace. These shelf lists link out to top container records. The vast majority of boxes are in ASpace already except for some that are unprocessed and not yet added/linked. There are a number of fields in these spreadsheets that don't have a good home in ASpace, but are working on solutions there. We mostly import inventories with the spreadsheet importer and all processors can create and delete boxes. We have a lot of shared boxes as we have a lot of small collections and not a lot of space. We plan to launch our PUI soon and use Aeon. As we approach a universe where it may be more realistic to have all our boxes in ASpace, there are a few things that make me nervous about maintaining accurate container/location information. - Processors may duplicate existing shared boxes in a number of ways. e.g. forget the barcode in the spreadsheet (the means of connecting to existing boxes) or it mismatches in some way (e.g. the barcode column is set to Number not plain text so the barcode's leading zeros are dropped and not matched) - Processors botch an inventory upload, delete the inventory, but not any new boxes created with the original upload. When they upload again there are 2 records for the same box. - Processors forget to add barcode, location, and/or container profile information post upload - In a botched upload, a processor does delete all the boxes, but accidentally deletes a shared box they forgot about, thereby deleting the link to potentially a dozen other collections. I've encountered most of the above problems before. We definitely would love all our boxes in one system and not have to maintain the same information in 2 places, but are thinking about consequences of that. If you fully maintain your container inventory in ASpace, have you encountered any of these errors? Have you put any controls in place to ensure that mistakes are less likely? Without any of our secondary spreadsheet shelf lists as a countercheck, I'm worried about lost or inaccurate information. Thanks, Olivia -- Olivia Solis, MSIS (she/her) 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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