importing an ArchivesSpace repo into an existing ArchivesSpace that has some duplicate global records

[Christine Di Bella]

Hello everyone,

Someone recently asked me a question that I thought I’d put out for the collective wisdom of the list since I have to think there are people out there encountering the same challenge and I’m curious about the approaches being taken.

Use case: 

They need to export one or more repositories from one instance of ArchivesSpace and import those entire repositories into another instance of ArchivesSpace that already has one or more active repositories in it.

They have successfully used an older tool created by Hudson Molonglo (https://github.com/lyrasis/aspace-repo-move-tools) to export a repository from one instance of ArchivesSpace and import it into a different, EMPTY instance of ArchivesSpace. 

However, when the target ArchivesSpace instance is not empty, this existing tool cannot complete the transfer if it runs into any records with global scope in the import that already exist in the target ArchivesSpace (based on uniqueness constraints set on the record type being imported).  (e.g. Both have a container profile with name “Banker Box”)

Is there another community-created tool out there to do this? If someone has gone through this process, what did you do to resolve the conflicts?

Thanks for any and all thoughts,

Christine

Christine Di Bella

ArchivesSpace Senior Program Manager

christin...@lyrasis.org