[Archivesspace_Users_Group] Digital Objects – examples of ASpace records + repository objects?

[McKeehan, Morgan]

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for examples of how other institutions have handled relationships between ASpace records and digital repository content, in cases when the physical arrangement vs. intellectual arrangement poses object-modeling challenges for digitized representations.

For example, in your systems do you have scenarios when an ASpace archival object record may have many ASpace digital object (DO) records linked to it, with each DO record corresponding to an individual object in your digital repository system? Conversely, perhaps there are also  situations where a single digital repository object contains files/digitized pages that are described by separate archival object records – ie, a folder of stuff that was digitized as one grouping, but actually corresponds to more than one individual descriptive component?

At my institution, we’re working through these issues as we’re migrating our digitized materials to a new digital repository system at the same time as we’re also migrating our finding aids/archival data to ASpace. We would welcome any examples that others can share, in case you may have approaches from what has worked well, or lessons learned about what to avoid.

Please also feel free to message me off-list if more context or clarification about what I’m asking would be helpful. I’m happy to discuss more about our workflows and object modeling plans so far.

I’d also be happy to set up a zoom call if anyone has examples to share that it would be easier to walk through via zoom. I totally understand there may be examples that just seem too complicated to try to explain in an email!

Here's a little more explanation about the kinds of linking situations I’m asking about:

In our new digital repository, we plan to model digitized materials as repository objects based on the physical containers. For example, all digitized pages from a folder of correspondence would equal 1 repository object (a “Work”). The URL of the repository object will provide the File Version value for an ASpace Digital Object record, and that DO record will be linked to the relevant archival object record that contains the description for the original materials.

In cases such as a grouping of documents that is housed in a range of physical folders, this will mean many DO records linked to an archival object record. A common scenario is something like: a descriptive component with Title: “Correspondence, 1800”, housed in “Folders 65-75”. This arrangement will give us 11 DO records linked to the “Correspondence, 1800” archival object record. In many cases, folder ranges will be even larger, so there could easily be 20-30 or more DO records linked to an AO record. However, if we instead modeled all scans from Folders 65-75 as 1 object in our digital repository, since each folder contains 100+ pages, that arrangement would be a large and cumbersome repository object for users to navigate. Neither option seems great. We’re interested in learning about how others handle these types of situations! 

Thanks for any examples or insights you can share,

Morgan 

------------------------

Morgan McKeehan (she/her/hers)

Digital Collections Specialist

University Libraries

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

morg...@email.unc.edu

[Newhouse, Sarah]

Morgan, 

We've been putting off a similar discussion for a while now, because of all the reasons you've already outlined.

We initially tried using the DAO component for access, to link our ASpace PUI with our digital collections, but ran into issues with differing levels of description between the PUI and our DC. Specifically, a few large collections that had grant-funded digitization to scan and create item-level records in the DC for everything. So a folder or volume/item-level component in ASpace would have 100+ DAOs linked to it, which made for a really unhelpful PUI experience for users looking at that component with just an endless vertical scroll of DAOs. 

Our longer-term solution is to look not at ASpace, but at the data in our DC and see if there's a way we can create or simulate folder or volume-level works for relevant items in the DC and link to those using the ASpace DAOs, so there's one DAO for one ASpace component (folder, volume, box, what have you). Luckily, when the DC was built (before ASpace adoption) the developers built in a field for physical location that records box, folder, and volume info (scroll down, under "Institutional location"): https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/k0lxixk 

Our interim solution is to use the Existence and Location of Copies note and link to collection-level works in our DC. Example here: https://archives.sciencehistory.org/repositories/3/resources/635 

Happy to talk more over Zoom or email if more details would be helpful! We're a small library just trying to make access as easy as possible with the tools we've got. 

Science History Institute 
Chemistry • Engineering • Life Sciences 
315 Chestnut Street • Philadelphia, PA 19106 • U.S.A.
We tell the stories behind the science.
sciencehistory.org 

__________________________________

Sarah Newhouse   (she, her, hers)
Digital Preservation Archivist
Othmer Library of Chemical History 
t. +1.215.873.8249

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From: archivesspace_us...@lyralists.lyrasis.org <archivesspace_us...@lyralists.lyrasis.org> on behalf of McKeehan, Morgan <morg...@live.unc.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, December 5, 2023 10:42 AM
To: archivesspac...@lyralists.lyrasis.org <archivesspac...@lyralists.lyrasis.org>
Subject: [Archivesspace_Users_Group] Digital Objects – examples of ASpace records + repository objects?

 

[Clair, Kevin]

It's my favorite ArchivesSpace question!

I've managed this a couple of different ways. When I worked at the University of Denver we had (well, presumably they still have) a home-grown digital asset management system that relied entirely on ArchivesSpace as the metadata system of record. For that we assumed that every object in the digital repository also had a metadata record in ArchivesSpace, and we used the update-feed API endpoint to communicate when new digital objects had been created or existing ones had been updated so that the repository would reindex. I'm sure somewhere I still have my documentation of how that data model worked and can forward it to you if it's of interest, with the caveat that I left DU four years ago and I don't know how much it has changed in the meantime.

Here at Penn State, our digital object guidelines state that every item in our repository should have a unique identifier, which for bibliographic materials is its OCLC number and for archival materials is based on the ArchivesSpace reference ID. We've found, as Sarah described, that this poses problems with older digital collections that were published before we had guidelines, where their source collections are processed at the folder level but the digital collection is published at the item level. How we handle that varies based on the collection. Sometimes we will re-publish the digital collection to reflect the arrangement of the archival collection; more rarely, we will maintain the digital collection as it is and re-arrange the archival collection to reflect CONTENTdm. Ideally we want to be at the point where we have a strict 1:1 relationship between archival object and DAO records in ArchivesSpace. (Technically 1:2, because we manage access and preservation digital objects separately.)

We considered and abandoned the One Item, Many DAOs approach Sarah describes, although if you know where to look in our PUI you can definitely still find some examples of it...

Happy to talk more about this and/or share documentation, although I feel like our documentation is probably inadequate (isn't it always, though?).

cheers

-kevin

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From: archivesspace_us...@lyralists.lyrasis.org <archivesspace_us...@lyralists.lyrasis.org> on behalf of Newhouse, Sarah <snew...@sciencehistory.org>
Sent: Tuesday, December 5, 2023 1:09 PM
To: Archivesspace Users Group <archivesspac...@lyralists.lyrasis.org>
Subject: Re: [Archivesspace_Users_Group] Digital Objects – examples of ASpace records + repository objects?

 

[McKeehan, Morgan]

Thank you for all the responses to this question! It's a huge help seeing the range of examples y'all have provided.

I will reach out to folks individually with followup questions. Just wanted to send a big thanks for all the time and thought folks put into sharing examples. We really appreciate it!

Morgan

------------------------

Morgan McKeehan (she/her/hers)

Digital Collections Specialist

University Libraries

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

morg...@email.unc.edu

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From: archivesspace_us...@lyralists.lyrasis.org <archivesspace_us...@lyralists.lyrasis.org> on behalf of Clair, Kevin <km...@psu.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, December 5, 2023 15:05

To: Archivesspace Users Group <archivesspac...@lyralists.lyrasis.org>
Subject: Re: [Archivesspace_Users_Group] Digital Objects – examples of ASpace records + repository objects?

 

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[Hand, Sarit]

Hi Morgan,

 

I grapple with this issue every time I get new content and if it is born digital versus digitized. The overall determining factors include how you catalogue your collections in ASpace and the digital repository system you use; how they integrate. There may be limitations, or the complexity involved in generating all the records and links, and time and staffing to do the work that may inform your practices. How much can you automate or do in bulk? Consider too, how the DR handles files and related information packages, representations etc.

 

Another factor is deciding how you want to use the DO record. I know many people use it just as a carrier for the link to the object in the DR. I could argue skipping the DO altogether and using a notes sub-record and simply put the link in the AO record itself. But that, again, may be determined by the integration options between the two systems and workflows you can set up. Add that you will have to encode the link in the notes field each time (unless you can automate it).  Will you use ASpace for descriptive info and the DR for everything technical? Can the system automate migrating that data over if you want one true source for everything?

 

Due to the integration options for our systems, I depend upon the DR to manage the technical metadata and UIDs for anything digital, some of which, like the UID and links, are populated into ASpace records but not detailed techMD. I generally follow the practice that the DO represents the AO. If the lowest child record is a folder, then the DO linked, represents the digital folder, not the content. This means, in our system, the link in the DO record will go to the folder in the DR. That folder will contain the files/assets/digital items, even if it is 1 or 1 thousand files. I tried the idea of creating single DOs per file and linking many DOs to a single AO, but that gets complicated and there is no real new info in the DO to warrant filling up the database nor do we have the resources to describe every page in every folder but I have had to adjust our records to add levels of descriptions so I can link something. I have found this practice helps to resolve a lot of my “what to do” questions. For example, we photograph our artifacts, nothing fancy, but we get several images, from different angles if the object warrants it. The images are saved in folders using the object’s ID (in-house number) to name the folder and each image gets a suffix (_01, _02,…). That folder of images is what the DO represents and the link in the DO will resolve to. I apply the same concept to digital files I have for meetings where I have digital recordings, video, audio, text and PDFs. Each meeting is represented by the AO and the DO will link to the folder containing the files (the folder intellectually represents the meeting). I may describe the contents of the folder, including file types in the extent or physical description; I happen to be working on this collection, now so am working out the details.

 

Honestly, I remind myself that as an archivist, my job is to describe to the best of my ability and make it accessible, which sometimes means, researchers will have to sift through and read individual files for themselves to determine what it is. If I provide individual links to individual items, researchers will be clicking forever just to scan a folder of items. I also do pilot tests to check usability. But all of this is determined by the system you are using, how content is presented in the PUI, and overall functionality.

 

Hope that helps.

Always happy to discuss.

 

Cheers,

                                              

Sarit Hand                                                       200 Liberty St.

Digital Archivist                                               New York, NY 10281

Corporate Archives                                         T 212.621.7035

 

sh...@ap.org                                                 

www.ap.org

From: archivesspace_us...@lyralists.lyrasis.org <archivesspace_us...@lyralists.lyrasis.org> On Behalf Of McKeehan, Morgan
Sent: Tuesday, December 5, 2023 5:18 PM
To: Archivesspace Users Group <archivesspac...@lyralists.lyrasis.org>
Subject: Re: [Archivesspace_Users_Group] Digital Objects – examples of ASpace records + repository objects?

 

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