Linking repositories

[Samantha Evans]

Hello

 

Does anyone have experience of working with repositories owned by companies that have merged?

 

We have an example here where a company with its own ArchivesSpace repository merged with another. A new repository was created for the merged organisation and the decision was taken to add new accessions only to the new repository. However, continuing series continue to be added to in the old repository. As a result, accession records are not always in the same repository as their related archival object. It is impossible in this case to take advantage of inbuilt functionality of spawning and linking records. Even putting in web links is fiddly and useless in practice because of the single active repository rule. (It is possible to link one way — accession to archival object — via the PUI, but not all of their archival objects are going to be published.)

 

Everyone I've talked so far to thinks this is an intractable problem that could only be solved by merging the repositories or moving the accessions, but given that companies and other organisations do merge and demerge and so do their archives, I wondered if anyone has been thinking about this?

 

Best wishes

Sam

 

 

 

Sam Evans

Assistant Archivist (Archive Management System)

Cambridge University Library, UK

 

I work in this role Monday morning, Wednesday and Friday