Hi Stuart,
Unfortunately not at this time - mainly to ensure that the application is as flexible as possible for different archival contexts and use cases, AtoM doesn't have any internal sense of hierarchy when it comes to levels. The levels are all just flat sibling terms in a "Levels of description" taxonomy and archival descriptions can have an arbitrary / unbounded number of levels.
This means that when you're creating a record, AtoM currently has no concept of it having a level - internally, a "level" is just a foreign-key relationship to a term in a taxonomy table and not something meaningful that AtoM can enforce.
This more generalized approach allows for a couple important things, such as:
- Any level of description can be a top-level of description, allowing for the Australian Series system to work alongside the European and North-American focus on the Fonds, Record Group, or Collection as top levels; or allowing for museums and others to have Items as standalone / top-level records for objects and ephemera
- Users can add any level of description as needed or as defined by local policy or best practice without AtoM needing to understand where it belongs in a hierarchy - so you can create a Sub-subfonds term, or a Sub-sub-sub-sub-subseries, or a View (to capture one aspect of an item for example) or some other sub-item level
- In general, AtoM's approach has always been very permissive rather than prescriptive - AtoM will display warnings based on recommendations for required fields from relevant standards for example, but it will not enforce these. In fact, you can create a completely blank record in AtoM if you want! To ensure we can cover as many possible use cases as possible, any new features need to be flexible and configurable enough to work in different contexts, jurisdictions, languages, etc. As such, we would want to be careful about how we implemented such functionality, were it ever to be added.
Additionally, AtoM has some known issues in its permissions module that would likely need to be addressed before you could add a significant amount more complexity to it, to be able to support this particular feature request. I've described some of these known issues in previous threads - if you're curious, see for example:
I suspect that attempting to change this and allow an administrator to limit description group permissions by level of description would be a complex and expensive project, and may require us to first resolve the issues described above.
Regards,