You didn't - you emailed the forum - which is great! Because we can't freely offer individualized support, and when we have these conversations in the user forum, 1) other users can share their own tips, tricks, and workarounds that I might not have thought of, and 2) future users with similar questions can find this thread as a resource.
Sorry I am not sure what you mean. The accession record template has an Acquisition date, but it also has Dates of creation, which include 3 fields, much as you find on descriptions: a free-text date fields that allows for typographical marks to express approximation or uncertainty, per your chosen standard or local conventions; and two controlled fields (start and end date fields) that expect ISO 8601 dates in YYYY, YYYY-MM, or YYYY-MM-DD format.
There is not currently. If you create an archival description from the accession record (or link an existing description, etc), several of the description templates have fields for this. The current accession record template has very little for describing the materials themselves - it is mostly for getting administrative control over the receipt of the materials.
That said, there are two fields in the Administrative area that could be pretty easily repurposed if you'd like: the Acquisition type and Resource type fields are both controlled value fields, linked to user-editable taxonomies (Accession acquisition type and Accession resource type). Meaning you can delete the existing terms and add your own if you'd prefer.
You can either add this information to one of the existing fields (such as the free-text Processing notes), or you can also link physical storage containers to an accession. And storage container types are a user-editable taxonomy of terms, so if your boxes are standard sizes, you can add different box types and link them that way.
In general, I'd also like to offer a bit of historical context.
First, while Artefactual is in the process of trying to transform our business model so we can have more agency and control over our software development and maintenance process, for many years feature development in AtoM only happened when it was sponsored by an institution willing to pay for changes. The accessions module was added in such a way in the early days of ICA-AtoM, meaning it was tailored fairly specifically to one institution's needs, and done at a time when there were no national or international standards for accession records to follow. Since then, very little development on the module has happened, save for a few enhancements in recent years
All this to say that we're aware that the Accessions module has a lot of room for improvement, and it's something we hope to address in the future. In recent years, we have seeen the emergence of the Canadian Archival Accession Information Standard (
CAAIS), which is the first national standard we've found for accessions. We like it a lot for how it follows the general structure of the ICA content standards, and seems flexible enough to work for many different archives - it's certainly an improvement over our current template, and therefore something we hope to fully implement in AtoM in the future. In fact, some of the more recent development was sponsored by Canadian institutions to slowly move us in the right direction, such as adding the accession events.
Right now, as part of Artefactual's evolution, we are focused on getting control on the maintenance backlog of our existing legacy applications. To this end, we now have a
new team of Maintainers, and they have recently released
their plans for the next couple AtoM releases, which are focused on upgrading many of the underlying legacy dependencies that AtoM uses. After that, they will be assessing their next steps - so we'll see!
All this to say that there's more that we'd love to do to improve the accessions module, but it will be a while before we can focus on that. We always welcome community pull requests, and maintain a number of
development resources on our wiki! In the meantime, the AtoM documentation should help you determine what you can and can't find in the Accessions module: