Marking agent records that represent staff members -- request for thoughts
Regina Carra
I’m working on building a massive ArchivesSpace repository at the City University of New York (CUNY) that will have over 20 repositories represented in one instance. In sum, there will be lots of agents, and numerous user accounts. Our answer to manage all of these agents is that we are going to encourage CUNY archivists to use authorities from authorized sources such as LC, Wikidata, SNAP, etc. (in other words, try not using “local sources”). We actually have a plan in the works to have a governance group audit authorities being created and edited in our instance as a check that they have authorized headings and are not duplicated. We're using custom reports to do this and the idea is to have this group meet a few times a semester.
Here’s the idea I need help with: I was thinking of adding a new controlled value to the “Source” drop down in Agents for “Staff” or “CUNY staff account” and then making it a step in our user account documentation to change the Source of the agent for the user to "Staff"/"CUNY staff" instead of "Local Sources." I want to make it a little clearer for the governance group, and everyone using the system, that the agent in question is not a clean-up project, but rather an agent related to a staff account, which therefore should be treated differently and essentially ignored in the audit process.
Is this a bad idea? Good idea? Negligible? Has anyone considered or implemented something similar?
One thing that I can see being a little confusing is that someone could be in the system twice in this scenario, both as a staff member working in ArchivesSpace but also as an Agent related to the content of the materials being described. For example, I would be in our ArchivesSpace instance twice, as both a staff person and an interviewer for an oral history. But in this case the sources would be different between the agent records, and perhaps the name order as well.
Many thanks in advance for your perspectives. Feel free to email me directly.
Regina Carra (she/her)
Office of Library Services
The City University of New York
555 W 57th Street, 16th Floor, Office 1681B
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Rhys Elia
Hi Regina,
Could you use functions and/or relations to indicate this? That is, create a related agent link between the staff member and the library/institution, or create a local agent (which I know you’re trying to avoid, but) that represents the group of staff members.
You can browse Agents by whether they are a user (using “Is User?”), but that may not be useful when working with a large amount of records.
I’m interested to hear what you end up doing!
Very best,
Rhys
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Rhys Elia, MFA, MLIS, CA (they/them)
Archivist for Special Collections, University Libraries
Adjunct Instructor, Department of Information Science
University at Buffalo
The State University of New York
420 Capen Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260-1674
+1 716 645 1370 | el...@buffalo.edu
library.buffalo.edu/specialcollections/
Special Collections is open to in-person research visits Monday through Friday from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm. Researchers are strongly encouraged to make an appointment by contacting the Poetry Collection, Rare Books Collection, Robert L. Brown History of Medicine Collection, or University Archives.
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Bowers, Kate A.
There is a field in an agent record that indicates if they are a user.
You can include the “Is user” field in the default browse columns of agent. It will show up as a column and display “TRUE” if the agent has an AS staff user account, but be blank if they do not have a user account.
Another thing to consider: If you have an institutional archive that might acquire the records of some of those repositories, then it can be very useful to have one agent for the repository *as a repository in ArchivesSpace* and another agent for the repository’s *authorized access point* as the unit whose records are being collected by another repository. The reason to have two different agents is because names may change and desired display may be different for the same unit in these two roles (as a repository users visit vs as a unit that generates records acquired by another repository). I’ve used the AuthorityID to distinguish agents that are repositories in ArchivesSpace vs an LCCN or other authority ID for the same agent as an authorized access point.
Kate
Kate Bowers (she/her)
Collections Services Archivist for Metadata, Systems, and Standards
Technical Services for Archives and Special Collections
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From: 'Regina Carra' via Archivesspace_Users_Group <Archivesspac...@lyrasislists.org>
Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2026 12:00 PM
To: 'René Vlak' via Archivesspace_Users_Group <archivesspac...@lyrasislists.org>
Subject: [ArchivesSpace Users Group] Marking agent records that represent staff members -- request for thoughts
Hello,
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