Hi again,
Yes, I think that could work - I mean, if it works for you, then it works! Keep in mind however that currently AtoM's physical storage module is very basic, and can't be organized hierarchically. You will be able to make another container called B3 (say for box 3 that lives on Shelf 12), but if you are not including any location information to tell them apart, it might get tricky to select the correct one from the autocomplete dropdown when linking it to a description.
One other possibility might be to give the containers meaningful codes that indicate this at a glance - for example:
- S03B11
- S03B12
- S04B01
- S04B02
- ...
- S04B11
- S04B12
And so forth. Just by the container name I can see that there are multiple Box 12's, but they belong on different shelves - S04B11 is not easily confused with S03B11. Plus, if you want to search, you can simply search for "S03" and it should return all containers that start with this:
Hopefully, this also means a bit less data entry for you as well :)
In my example above, note that I have added leading zeroes to the shelves (though I forgot in the screenshot example) - this is something else you might want to consider doing. AtoM's "alphabetic" sort is actually what's called ASCIIbetical, so without leading zeros, numbers would be organized like so:
I've previously mentioned this in the forum here, if you'd like more info.
Unless you have more than 99 shelves, and will ever have more than 99 boxes on a shelf, then a single leading zero should probably suffice if you choose to follow this method - e.g.:
Note that if you have more than one storage location where items live permanently, you could also extend this method further - e.g add a V for vault, or CS for cold storage as a prefix, etc.
Finally, I wanted to share one more interesting approach that we used to use at UBC when I worked there. The way that Rare Books and Special collections handled some of AtoM's limitations around physical storage was to make the archival description identifiers indicative of the physical organization of the materials - i.e. they indicate box and folder numbers. I've elaborated on this approach here:
Hope this gives you some ideas!
Cheers,