Hi there,
General tips for troubleshooting finding aid generation:
1) If it doesn't work at all, double-check that you have FOP installed::
- try the command fop -v to see if it returns a version or not
- It also requires Java to run - see this section of the docs where we install everything required, and run these commands if you cannot find FOP on your server
2) If it works on the command-line, but not via the UI, you might want to double-check your filesystem permissions
- AtoM expects all files and directories below the root installation directory to be owned by the www-data user
- If you have followed our recommended installation instructions, you can set this with: sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /usr/share/nginx/atom (described in the documentation here)
- In your case, it does look like you are maybe using Apache instead of Nginx? So you will need to modify the command's filepath (to at minimum /var/www/html/atom; but I also don't know what else might be different in your installation, so you may need to experiment some)
3) If you see an error that references the Library of Congress (loc) or returns a 403 forbidden error, then you may need to upgrade
As shown in this example screenshot:
- In older versions of AtoM, we used to make a call to the copy of the EAD 2002 DTD stored at the library congress when parsing the EAD header
- We weren't the only ones erroneously doing this, which was inadvertently causing outage issues at the Library of Congress, who hosts the EAD 2002 DTD
- Consequently, in newer versions of AtoM (2.7.0 and later) we now keep a copy of the DTD stored in AtoM directly, and will reference this
- You can see the issue tickets #13247 and #13590 for more information if you want
- Meanwhile, if you are using a version older than 2.7.0 and encountering this issue, upgrade to the latest release
4) If it works for some archival descriptions but not others, then it may be caused by reserved characters in your description
- Some characters are considered reserved in XML, such as the &, <, and > symbols
- If you have used these in your descriptions, they can cause the EAD rendering to fail - and generating the EAD is the first step of finding aid generation
- This also means if you have added HTML to the AtoM description edit fields to style content (such as bolding or italicizing, etc), this can cause the EAD generation to fail - instead, consider using Markdown to style content in AtoM descriptions
- Keep reading in the second half of this section of our Finding aid troubleshooting FAQ for more info
From what you have reported, I would first suggest you try checking and adjusting the filesystem permissions - perhaps AtoM cannot write to the /tmp directory where it is trying to create the finding aid. Let us know how it goes and what you find!
Cheers,