ArcLight Mapping

[Olivia Carlisle]

Hi,

I'm new to ArchivesSpace and ArcLight, so apologies if this has been addressed somewhere. One of our staff members is asking if there's a mapping document between ASpace and ArcLight. I've looked through GitHub and a few other places but haven't been able to find anything beyond the config files.

Thank you!

Olivia Carlisle

University of Georgia Libraries

[Gregory Wiedeman]

Hi Olivia,

We're working on better integrating ArcLight with ArchivesSpace, but it's a bit more complicated than a direct mapping. ArcLight parses EAD that is often exported from ASpace, so there are two independent layers. There is a bunch of Solr-specific reasons to why data is stored as it is in ArcLight and fields are often duplicated for different purposes (like notes stored both as text for indexing and HTML for display). This means there is a lot of logic to how the data is move that is more complex than a mapping, but some of that probably could also be better documented.

As part of our project we have a Python utility that moves data more precisely from the ASpace API into an ArcLight's Solr core. During our work we made an inventory of the ArcLight Solr fields that we've been meaning to share, so that you for prompting this!

Hopefully this helps somewhat with what you're working on, and many of us on here are happy to help troubleshoot any specific data issues (the #arclight channel on the Code4Lib slack is also a great place to ask). There are also a few known issues, where data gets added to ArcLight, but not displayed. We've worked on these cases in previous work cycles to hopefully get them addressed out-of-the-box, but most local implementations are able to address these fields by just adding them to their local catalog_controller.rb, which will make them display. There is a good Blacklight tutorial which shows how to do this for those new to Blacklight..

Hudson Molonglo is also working on an ASpace plugin as part of this work too that will send data ArcLight's Solr core directly from ASpace, but this is still in progress.

Best,

Greg