Archival institution metadata customization (changing of fields) and export

[Natasa Bulatovic]

Dear all,

we would like to add / remove some fields from the Archival institution
to fit our schema, and in addition implement the export of this definition.
We have customized the EAG, see

http://www.cendari.eu/wp-content/uploads/2-1-EAG-Institutional-documentation.doc
and
http://www.apex-project.eu/index.php/en/articles/172-eag-cendari-customising-eag-for-research-purposes

What would you suggest as the safest way to do it, without harming
future ATOM upgrades ? (note: current archival descriptions are used,
and are exportable in EAD format for further handling; however, we must
have additional editing of the EAF files which is quite cumbersome for
our users). We would appreciate a lot more detailed information or
technical contact person to help us with this issue.

Thank you,
Natasa

--
--
Natasa Bulatovic
Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL)
Amalienstrasse 33
80799 Munich, Germany
http://www.mpdl.mpg.de

e-Mail: bula...@mpdl.mpg.de
phone: +49-89-38602-223
fax: +49-89-38602-280

[Dan Gillean]

Hello Natasa,

First of all, what version of AtoM are you using? If you are using our older 1.x ICA-AtoM software and are considering doing development work, I would strongly urge you to consider working with AtoM 2 instead. Same application, similar codebase, same developers, and same open source license, but with an improved search index, new features, and completely rewritten documentation. Some links in case you are not familiar with our 2.x version:

• AtoM homepage: https://www.accesstomemory.org/
• AtoM 2.0 documentation: https://www.accesstomemory.org/docs/2.0/
• AtoM 2.0 demo site: http://demo.accesstomemory.org/

Please note as well that we are currently finalizing our 2.1 release, which we hope to have publicly available by the end of next week! We will be updating the website and posting in the User Forum when this occurs. If you are doing development work, we suggest that you start with at least the 2.1 codebase - and in fact, you may want to work against our qa/2.2.x branch so you have the latest developments for our 2.2 release. 

I will ask a developer to take a look at this thread and post some more detailed information for you than I as an archivist can supply. However, I will give you a few initial points to consider:

In general, we encourage users who develop new modules to develop them as plugins. You will find much on plugin development for the Symfony 1.x framework (which AtoM uses) in the Symfony documentation - namely, 

• http://symfony.com/legacy/doc/jobeet/1_4/en/20?orm=Propel
• http://symfony.com/legacy/doc/gentle-introduction/1_4/en/17-Extending-Symfony (also covers events and factories)
• http://symfony.com/legacy/doc

There is also a plugins site with almost 1500 open source plugins that can serve as a great reference: http://www.symfony-project.org/plugins/

We have 27 plugins in AtoM and they are all available here: https://github.com/artefactual/atom/tree/qa/2.1.x/plugins. Some of them are just themes but you will also find the sfEADPlugin and sfEACPlugin, for EAD and EAC-CPF respectively. These might also be useful to you as reference models.

A final point I wanted to make: depending on how your development work goes, you might consider contributing the code for  EAG export plugin back to Artefactual, for incorporation in a future public release. This would mean that all of our international users could benefit from your development work, and it would mean that your institution would not be responsible for maintaining the plugin over time as AtoM develops. The only tricky part of this is your customizations - we are committed to standards compliance, and while we would be open to improving compliance for our ISDIAH record template, we are not willing to include custom fields in a public release, as the purpose of AtoM is to encourage standards adoption for better exchange and reusability. However, with the EAG export we might be able to find enough common ground to include the plugin - giving our users a way to export and share ISDIAH data would be excellent!

Hope that helps get you started,

Dan Gillean, MAS, MLIS
AtoM Product Manager / Systems Analyst,
Artefactual Systems, Inc.
604-527-2056

@accesstomemory

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[Natasa Bulatovic]

Dear Dan,

thank you very much for your extensive information and links. We are using ATOM 2.0 version and we will take a look at the plugins base and see how we can contribute, thus we will surely post some further questions here. It would be great  to get in contact with a developer, as this may be the most efficient way to work and ensure, that our "customizations" or new plugins are compatible with future Atom releases - even maintained further by Atom - that would be our aim too.  All our code will be published as open source as well.

Best,
Natasa

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[Sarah Romkey]

Hello Natasa,

I just wanted to jump on this thread and add my thanks to Dan's for your interest in AtoM and potentially contributing code back to the community. Please do post your specific questions as they arise and we will have our developers take a look.

Cheers,

Sarah Romkey, MAS,MLIS

Systems Archivist
Artefactual Systems
604-527-2056

@ArchivesSarah

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