Report to show who created which descriptions (and when)

[sally-an...@york.ac.uk]

Good morning! I was wondering if anyone has ever run an AtoM report to pull out all archival descriptions created within a certain timeframe, showing the title of the description, the title of the fonds it's part of, who created the description and the date of creation?  I know you can already look at 'newest additions' but this doesn't record who created each item, or which fonds it's from, only the date and the title.  

As we have a lot of staff working on AtoM, it would be useful to have a way for people to work out how many descriptions they've each added - but we're not sure how to do that (except for the long way, eg. manually counting!)

Thank you for any help with this.

Sally-Anne (Borthwick Institute, York)

[Dan Gillean]

Hi Sally-Anne, 

By default, user information is not captured and stored during the creation process of records in AtoM. However, in 2.6, some basic audit log functionality was added for archival descriptions. When enabled, this will track creation and modification events per user, and per description. The details of the changes made during modifications are not captured, but it does include date, record, and user information for each change. 

This setting must be enabled for the information to be collected - meaning that enabling it does not automatically make previous activity available for review. Only additions and changes made after the setting is enabled will be captured. See: 

• https://www.accesstomemory.org/docs/latest/user-manual/administer/settings/#enable-description-change-logging
  

There are further links from that section of the settings documentation that will show you how to view all changes associated with a particular description, or a particular user.

When enabled, this functionality also allows you to apply usernames as a filter in the Description updates module (i.e. "Newest additions") - and the Description updates page already includes a date range search. Unfortunately, the results of a search here do not include the username, so you'd still need to go to each description to see its modification history, or else go to each user profile and view their modification history that way. We don't currently have a global report that covers exactly what you want. 

That said, once the description change logging (i.e. the audit log functionality) has been enabled via settings and has begun collecting data, I suspect it would be possible to use SQL to output the type of information you'd like to see. It will require several joins across tables however - I don't have such a query prepared to share, but I can point you to some resources that might help you construct one yourself: 

• We have Entity Relationship Diagrams of the database schemas on the wiki here: https://wiki.accesstomemory.org/Development/ERDs
• We have an introduction to common SQL queries in AtoM in the documentation here: https://www.accesstomemory.org/docs/latest/admin-manual/maintenance/common-atom-queries/
• These include how to access the MySQL command prompt, and some basic query examples that should help you understand the basic organization of the database; example joins, etc.
• There are some slides from a camp here that also include some examples and general overview information: https://www.slideshare.net/accesstomemory/constructing-sql-queries-for-atom

Adding support for something like a CSV or PDF report that can be generated via the user interface will require analysis and development to implement. 

Cheers, 

Dan Gillean, MAS, MLIS
AtoM Program Manager
Artefactual Systems, Inc.
604-527-2056

@accesstomemory

he / him

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[Dan Gillean]

PS, the audit information is stored in a database table called audit_log when the setting is enabled. You can see it described in the schema here: 

• https://github.com/artefactual/atom/blob/qa/2.x/config/schema.yml#L45-L51
  

Dan Gillean, MAS, MLIS
AtoM Program Manager
Artefactual Systems, Inc.
604-527-2056

@accesstomemory

he / him

[sally-an...@york.ac.uk]

I'm so sorry, Dan, I thought I'd said thank you for your kind help but I obviously haven't! I've enabled the user setting in the description update module and hopefully that will do what we need for now!

Best,

Sally