Limiting volunteer users to particular archival levels
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Stuart Bligh
Mar 1, 2023, 5:19:31 AMMar 1
to AtoM Users
Hi - is there a way of limiting the rights of a user group on ATOM to a particular archival level? For example so that anyone in that user group can only add, adjust and edit record at file and item level and not at any level above?
Dan Gillean
Mar 1, 2023, 9:09:22 AMMar 1
to ica-ato...@googlegroups.com
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,
he / him
On Wed, Mar 1, 2023 at 5:19 AM 'Stuart Bligh' via AtoM Users <ica-ato...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
Hi - is there a way of limiting the rights of a user group on ATOM to a particular archival level? For example so that anyone in that user group can only add, adjust and edit record at file and item level and not at any level above?
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Stuart Bligh
Mar 1, 2023, 9:37:12 AMMar 1
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That's really useful thanks Dan ... and thanks too for the quick response
Best wishes
Stuart
Stuart Bligh
Archive Advisor
Mob: 07949377526
2-3, Gunnery Terrace
Cornwallis Road
London SE18 6SW
2-3, Gunnery Terrace
Cornwallis Road
London SE18 6SW
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Stuart Bligh
May 26, 2023, 9:33:05 AM (3 days ago) May 26
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Hi Dan
I've been trying to create a location hierarchy in ATOM but am confused by the range of terms relating to the location of an archive item within a storage area ie physical object type, physical storage and location .... and also how these various descriptors of an item's location link to each other.
Ideally for an archival institution I want to create a hierarchy which looks something like ...
storage block 1 - Level 1 - Rack 1 - shelf 1 then storage block 2 Level 1 Rack 1- shelf 1 etc etc
but there doesn't seem to be anywhere to create a location hierarchy like this? Or should it build from the container type? That is box 1 - shelf 1 - rack 1 - level 1 - storage block 1? If that's the case it presumably means that each box needs a unique reference number as well as each archival item having a unique reference number? That may be an issue as in most cases the archive ref is the box ref ... although I suppose I can just use the same reference number.
Would be grateful for your thoughts ...
Thanks
Stuart
Archive Advisor
Mob: 07949377526
2-3, Gunnery Terrace
Cornwallis Road
London SE18 6SW
2-3, Gunnery Terrace
Cornwallis Road
London SE18 6SW
On Wed, 1 Mar 2023 at 14:09, Dan Gillean <d...@artefactual.com> wrote:
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Dan Gillean
May 26, 2023, 10:02:46 AM (3 days ago) May 26
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Hi Stuart,
Unfortunately, AtoM's physical storage module is very basic at the moment - it was added early in ICA-AtoM development and has not seen significant sponsorship for a redesign or new features since. Consequently, the module currently is much more like a key/value pair - it does not have the ability to organize containers and locations hierarchically (for example, to nest a folder in a box, on a shelf, in a range, in a specific building, etc.).
Because of this, we generally recommend that you use unique names for storage containers - perhaps even incorporating your description reference code(s) into the container, to make it easier to find the correct container in the future when using drop-downs and autocomplete fields.
This thread, for example, discusses this somewhat, as well as some alternatives that others are using:
This thread, for example, discusses this somewhat, as well as some alternatives that others are using:
You can also search for other threads in the forum that have covered this - for example, here is a search result page of all threads that have the label "physical-storage" and the word "hierarchical" in them:
You can learn more about how we use labels to make searching the forum by topic easier here:
he / him
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Stuart Bligh
May 26, 2023, 10:11:39 AM (3 days ago) May 26
to ica-ato...@googlegroups.com
Thanks Dan - that is really helpful ....
Stuart
Stuart Bligh
Archive Advisor
Mob: 07949377526
2-3, Gunnery Terrace
Cornwallis Road
London SE18 6SW
2-3, Gunnery Terrace
Cornwallis Road
London SE18 6SW
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ica-atom-users/CAC1FhZ%2BqmRCFxeRnxy6v%2BXcgUqho27bgT_GeYagRNSSJzvMHZw%40mail.gmail.com.
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