Hi Debra,
I believe that this comes down to a bit of a difference in archival description paradigms across jurisdictions, as this generally comes up with new U.S. AtoM users. AtoM purposefully separates the intellectual arrangement of an archival unit (i.e. fonds, record group, collection, etc) from its physical arrangement - because how an archivist organizes materials intellectually into a series then a file for example, may not 100% represent how physical realities require those materials going into new housings like boxes and folders.
For example: If the original creator had a box's worth of materials crammed into a single folder, then when you rehouse those materials, it's very likely you are not going to overstuff a single archival folder just to match the original arrangement - you are more likely to make a note of this in the arrangement but physically split the contents into as many folders as needed. That is to say: intellectually, this remains one FILE, even if in practice it is rehoused into multiple folders.
This distinction seems to be a common sticking point when U.S. users first move to AtoM, as most Canadian and European users tend not to use "Box" or "Folder" as intellectual levels of arrangement, and therefore they are not included in AtoM's level of description taxonomy by default. They are also separated out because many archival users we have encountered see making physical location information public a potential security risk, and so they either do not use AtoM's physical storage module (preferring to manage the information elsewhere), or else use the Visible Elements module to keep physical storage information fully hidden from public users.
In the meantime, you can find many longer discussions of this, as well as some possible workarounds, by looking at some previous threads on this topic in the forum. Here are the results of a quick search for "Archon box" - in particular, I recommend taking a look at the threads related to m.gorzalski, as these were all about reconciling differences between AtoM and Archon during a migration project, and this particular issue came up a lot:
My short answer would be:
AtoM's physical storage module, where you can manage boxes and folders related to their actual on-site physical location, is pretty basic at the moment and in need of further development. Use it mainly for adding box/folder barcodes or lookup numbers
If you are using box and folder as part of your public arrangement information in the archival unit's hierarchy, then I suggest that you add "Box" as a custom level of description in the Levels of Description taxonomy, and modify the default "File" term to say "Folder" instead. Then you should be able to use AtoM's existing arrangement and description functionality as needed to create and manage your hierarchies. For managing taxonomies and terms, see:
Cheers,