Accessions functionality

[Danielle Robichaud]

Good morning, 

Over the past year our team has taken a closer look at the available functionality tied to accessions in AtoM. Although we've migrated a critical mass of our descriptive records to AtoM, our accession records remain in a legacy textbase and the current AtoM functionality has continued to pose a barrier to wholesale migration. 

We've hit on a number of issues, some of which are logged in Github or here in other threads, and of some of which may be specific to us. Here's what we've pulled together: 

1. Cannot export accession records
2. Cannot pull up list of the deaccessioned records; have to see them individually via their accession record. Add "deaccessioned" into title to make it easier for us to identify?
3. Cannot manage donors communication independent of an accession record
4. Cant have more than 1 contact per office - create new donor for people?
5. Have to write full date for an event or it does not save. Have to add in a full date YYYY-MM-DD --- issue with legacy but not today's records
6. Default taxonomies seem to come back even when deleted
7. Cannot attach PDFs

I'm curious if there is any appetite from other AtoM users to pool resources in order to have improvements to the accession function(s) funded as a collaborative effort rather than waiting for things to get addressed over time. 

Doing so would be, of course, contingent on Artefactual's involvement in terms of improvement feasibility and costing. 

Any initial thoughts? Concerns? Red flags?

[Sarah Mason]

Dear Danielle,

Thank you for sharing your accessions module wishlist with the community, I hope it sparks some interesting discussions from other users. I do have some suggestions that will help further the discussion and engage with the open source project more.

First, your wishlist item 1.Cannot export accession records, this was addressed partially in 2.9.2 with CLI export functionality. You can view the pull request here, which was a community contribution. The same contributor has another pull request for Accessions exports from the Clipboard and it will be released in 2.10, so you will have the full functionality soon!

For the rest of your wishlist, it would be useful to link to the relevant forum thread or current issue in Github. This will allow others to gather more context. Ideally, others (and yourself) will also directly comment on the existing issues so we can review them. If there aren’t issues for your wishlist items (for example, #7. Cannot attach PDFs, does not have an issue), you could log them. There’s some guidance on reporting bugs or feature requests here. When logging an issue or feature request, it helps to be as specific as possible:

• What version of AtoM are you using? 

• What problem(s) are you trying to solve (this is relevant for feature requests like #7, not just issues) 

• What is your use case?

• Do you currently have any workarounds? (this might be useful when reporting issue #5. Have to write full date for an event or it does not save. Have to add in a full date YYYY-MM-DD --- issue with legacy but not today's records)

The more specific you can be not only helps us to better triage the issue, but it helps the rest of the community better understand and hopefully engage with the issue. The more users that provide feedback on the logged issue, the better view we have of community needs. As you said in your post, “some of which may be specific to us” and getting community engagement on issues (and on forum posts like this) helps us gauge that.

If you have any questions about logging issues, please let me know. You can also contact us at contri...@artefactual.com.

Best wishes,

Sarah

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Sarah Mason

Contributor Success Specialist

Artefactual Systems Inc.

www.artefactual.com  

she/her

[Danielle Robichaud]

Thanks for the response, Sarah. 

I appreciate the suggestions for how to proceed, particularly the logging of enhancement requests and the articulation of use cases. 

To that end here are items I can speak to right now - I will plan to circle back about the others once I've chatted with my colleagues. 

 1. Cannot export accession records

•  Soon to be addressed! See Sarah's response above. 

2. Cannot pull up list of the deaccessioned records; have to see them individually via their accession record. Add "deaccessioned" into title to make it easier for us to identify? - 

• Not found as noted issue elsewhere.
• Submitted as: Enhancement: Introduction of facets to Browse accessions display #2159

5. Have to write full date for an event or it does not save. Have to add in a full date YYYY-MM-DD --- issue with legacy but not today's records. 

• Not found as a noted issue elsewhere. 
• Submitted as: Enhancement: Expand Acquisition date in accession form to include YYYY only or free-form entries #2157

7. Cannot attach PDFs. 

• Not found as a noted issue elswhere.
• Submitted as: Enhancement: Enable attachment of PDFs to accession records #2158