Exporting Agents associated with specific Archival Objects

[Paul Sutherland]

Hi all,

We have a number of collections that use the agents descriptively at the archival object level. We would like to be able to easily access them when doing an export of individual archival objects, so we can copy them into other fields, or use them in our DAMS, etc.

One challenge right now is e.g. a 600+ record collection where we need to put linked agents at the beginning of titles (using bulk update) and put them into our DAMS, as the whole collection is fully digitized but needs to go online with the agents.

The most promising easy option on the staff side is the potential for the bulk update spreadsheets to export this data. We're already using this to get DAMS data. I'm told this may be done at some point, but that the current effort is focused on getting the bulk update spreadsheet to be part of the core code as it was written.

Until that may be possible, I'm looking at other ways at this, on the staff side:

• EAD, checking what's under the AO id (this can be produced from the collection very quickly)
• Custom Reports, which will produce a listing of every instance of every agent (very large and needs to be produced regularly to avoid going out of sync with the database)
  

For both of these, it would involve some scripting to get the correct matches and put them in the right place.

There's also MySQL and the API, which I don't know if are even set up right now.

Am I overlooking anything obvious? Have others used these or something else themselves? Are there tools I should know about?

Many thanks,

Paul

--

Paul Sutherland (he/his)
Archivist of Indigenous Materials
Center for Native American and Indigenous Research

Library & Museum
American Philosophical Society
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Philadelphia, PA 19406

Lenapehoking

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[Paul Sutherland]

Just wanting to update here that I went with a Custom Report of all agents and linked records (refids and titles). I created a list of refids and titles from the ArchivesSpace Bulk Update Spreadsheet, and used a Python script using Pandas to match this with the agents, refids and titles from the custom report. Fortunately simple in the end. Let me know if you are trying to do this with your own records.

Paul