Accession Records

As a graduate or student assistant, you will not need to accession collections. But it does help to know what accessions look like and where to find the relevant metadata in ArchivesSpace. 

Accession records will tell you what material was received, who donated it, when it was donated, and will be linked to the corresponding collection. An accession number is NOT the same as the collection ID. You will most likely be processing a single accession, whose extent will match the amount of material you are processing (ex. 1 cubic foot for physical or 1 MB for digital). Collections whose donors are regularly donating records, such as with collections within the University Archive, will have multiple accessions (as seen below).

All accessions can be found in ArchivesSpace on the Finding Aid page of the collection. It is the seventh section, located under Revision Statements and before Agent Links.

Resources

Collections are referred to as Resources in ArchivesSpace. If you were to browse “Resources” under the “Browse” tab in the upper right hand corner below the ArchiveSpace logo, you would be exploring the various collections which may be labeled as collections or papers. 

A Resource record can either be created through the “Create” tab in the top menu, or by spawning an Accession record. If you’ve spawned a Resource record from an Accession record, you will notice that the Basic Description portion of the resource record is already populated with much of the basic descriptive information that had previously been entered into the accession record.

Open

As a graduate student, the Resource record, (aka the collection), will have already been created by an archivist before assigning you the project (often referred to as “the shell” of the collection). You can find the Resource record by entering the collection ID or name into the search bar. Inform an archivist if you have trouble locating the collection.

Resource Type (required)

The nature of the archival unit according to DACS guidance: Papers, Collection, or Records.

• Papers should be used when the materials being described consist of three or more forms of documents that were created, assembled, accumulated, and/or maintained and used by a person or family.

• Records should be used when the materials being described consist of three or more forms of documents that were created, assembled, accumulated, and/or maintained and used by a government agency or private organization such as a business or club.

• Collection should be used to describe an intentionally assembled collection.

You will not be making this determination as a graduate student, but if you are curious as to the distinctions between the three, this is how they are distinguished.

Extents

In physical collections, extents are calculated in cubic feet, to match the size of the collection. Digital collections are measured in bytes. This field will need to be updated after you have finished processing the collection. Digital collections can be recalculated after being processed by viewing the properties of the folders you have uploaded (masters or derivatives or a combination if necessary). This can be done by right-clicking the file, going to properties and then viewing “Size.”

You only want the extent to match which items you are including in the collection, similar to how you wouldn’t include removed materials in your total calculation of the size of a physical collection.

Extents CAN include both physical and digital materials, but will need to be notated separately.

The “Type” field, which is used to describe the unit of measurement of the extent, is filled with pre-populated fields, which can be searched through the dropdown arrow on the right hand side. If you cannot find a unit of measure that matches, you can manually type a new unit, which will add it to the list. Please check the list before adding another to avoid duplication.

For physical processing, Yale offers a linear footage calculator to determine extent measurements.

Extents is the fourth section from the top. It is below “Dates” and before “Finding Aid Data.”

Licenses & Rights Statements

Licenses and Rights Statements are fields that you have not had to actively think about in physical processing as the Memo of Agreements (MOA) and Use Agreements (forms users fill out at the beginning of their visits) cover a majority of the possible implications of use for an individual collection.

Digital objects are not so easy.

Physical collections have a literal door between the user and the materials, allowing the archivist to disseminate the information to the specification of the donor and archive. For digital objects, that door is always open, the materials discoverable online and at a more lateral point than what traditional archival theory would suggest. They may not read the collection level notes, but they will see all the notes and data at an item level.

Licenses

This is where the license and rights statements come into play. Licensing, in our use, two variations of “Creative Commons”, Public Domain, and unknown, inform the user of the level of permissions that they need to obtain to use the digital object in their work. 

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC-BY-NC-SA)

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY)

Public Domain

• The public domain consists of works that are not subject to copyright. This is a vast, ever-growing pool of material on which new creativity and knowledge may be built without concern for copyright.

Unknown

If the license is unknown, because we do not own the rights and are unable to get a license, we must then apply a rights statement.

Rights Statement

A rights statement is only required when the license is set to “unknown”. From there you must set the rights to “In Copyright- Educational Use Permitted”. Users cannot publish these materials, even with citation, and must seek the original license holder for permission. If they are simply using the information for teaching a class, or writing a paper for a class (and any other area that fits into educational use but does not an element of financial gain) they can use the materials. 

It is not up to you to make this determination, and you should not guess the license or rights statement of the collection you are processing. Ask the archivist that assigns you whether or not we have the rights to a collection, and what level of license you would like the digital objects to have. You may have to make some judgement calls on an item by item basis because of the ownership of the item. I.e. if a collection contains scans of a newspaper that the donor did not have ownership of, the license should be set to “Unknown” and the rights statement to “In Copyright”. The same collection may have personal journals or notes that, if the archive has the license to these items, may be set to “CC-BY”.

Instances

Instances are used to record information about the physical instantiations of materials represented in the record, as well as to describe digital objects. Instances are especially important when it comes to digital archival objects (DAO) as the digital object record is linked via the instance, and the DAO is an instance of the item record. An object can have multiple instances if there are multiple digital objects linked. Though it should be noted that multiple digital objects is not best practice as it is better to compile materials into singular objects either digitally or by ensuring that an entire folder is digitized instead of only digitizing part of the folder. 

You can add an instance within the editing feature. Physical instances (container instance) are highlighted yellow and Digital Objects are highlighted green.

A physical instance will look like this after the Data Entry Sheet has been uploaded:

The blue “Top Container” box is linked, and by clicking on it, you are offered a “view” button which will take you to another page. I recommend right clicking it and opening in a new tab to avoid losing your place on the object page.

The instance page for a physical object looks like this:

You can see that the Instance page only refers to “Top Container”, meaning the Box, not the individual folder even though the folder (Box 1, Folder 5) is the object that brought us here, as instances are recorded in order from largest to smallest for example: box, then folder; or box, then box within that box, then envelope.

The locations section refers to the shelf location of the boxes within the stacks (or the sub-basements if appropriate). The blue location box is also linked to a Locations record, which is not something that you will have to worry about creating or maintaining as that is something that is automatically down when you upload a Data Entry Sheet in the asinventory app. 

An archival record can have both physical and digital instances if the physical item has been digitized.

Digital Object instances are different. Instead of pointing to a container, they point to a Digital Object Record. This record connects the access copy of the object, typically presented as a link on our website, to the archival component in ArchivesSpace.

A Digital Object Record looks like this:

The name is the unique identifier that represents the digital object and is the field used to link the two. You can see in the “File URI” field, the text after “/daos/” is the same identifier as the title. There is also an ArchiveSpace Identifier underneath the title field which refers to the ID of the record not the digital object. 

It is important to note that the Digital Object and the Digital Object Record are not the same. The digital object is the material itself, the document, presentation, image etc., whereas the Digital Object Record is the archival information (metadata, processing information, etc.) associated with that material that is housed on ArchivesSpace. 

The digital object is automatically created as a part of the Batch Upload or Single Upload process. Multiple digital objects can be linked to a single archival component through multiple instances, though it is not best practice. Though you will see that some records in ArchivesSpace do have multiple digital objects linked, moving forward we will attempt to combine multiple materials into a single object either digitally or by digitizing whole folders instead of just the materials requested, or “part” of the folder as it is typically referred to.

The final section, “Record Links” links back to the original archival component record. 

Deleting Digital Objects

If you wish to delete your Digital Object, you must first delete the Digital Object Record. If you just delete the link to the instance of the archival component page, you are only deleting the link and the Digital Object Record will continue to exist in the system as an unassociated object. You can delete the Digital Object Record by clicking the red “Delete” button on the right.

The linked instance will be automatically removed from the original Archival Object record.

Archival Components- Hierarchical Record Types

The terms “Components” and “Archival Objects” are synonymous in ArchivesSpace. 

As we know, there is a hierarchical or “funnel” nature to how archival information is arranged, from the collecting area, narrowing to the collection, and then narrowing further into series until we reach the individual item, or record, in each series. 

• Archive

  • Collecting Area

    • Collection

      • Series

        • Folder

          • Item

Individual records, in physical archiving, are typically described at the folder level and the title and date descriptions are for this folder which may contain multiple items. For digital archiving, you are much more likely to describe at the item level, which is more time-consuming and requires more intensive survey and consideration. Although UAlbany is moving towards describing digital objects in aggregate, or considering them in larger “groups” of material (the same way we would create a “correspondence” folder for a physical collection even if there was no such folder in the original order) this is still a work in progress and most of the literature on the topic is being generated internally (DadoCM) and has not yet been adapted by standards bodies like DACS or professional organizations like SAA.

ArchivesSpace honors the hierarchical relationship by arranging archival components via a “parent/child/sibling” order. Parent components represent the larger groupings: collections, series, etc. Children can be added as sub components of these parents by the “Add Child” button found on the top left hand side in the editing feature. The “Add Sibling” button creates a lateral component at the same hierarchical level.

• Level: Use series for any series that is a direct child component of a collection. Use subseries for any series that is a child of another series or subseries. Use file for a description of a folder or intellectually-related folders, and item for a description of a single item.

• Instances: A Container Instance is required at the level of description applicable. That is, if you are creating file level description, all Container Instances should be added in the file Components. 

Reordering

To manually reorder records within ArchivesSpace (meaning without your using the asinventory application) you must first enter the editing feature and then enable reorder mode in the left hand corner above the collection name.

Reorder mode allows you to manually drag and drop records (via the 15 dot rectangle in the left column). After dropping the object, a three option menu will appear, allowing you to either add the object before, after, or as a child (lower hierarchically) similar to inserting a row in an Excel spreadsheet.

Notes

ArchivesSpace supports the use of 28 descriptive notes, each of which can be repeated, and all of which are available in the Notes section.

Notes are sequenced vertically, with the note most recently entered at the bottom of the sequence. The position of a note in the sequence can be modified by clicking on the horizontal bars in the left-hand corner of the note frame and dragging the note to a new position above or below.

Notes may be a single part note or a multi-part note, depending on which type of note you are creating. Differing levels of the hierarchical structure will require different notes, as per DACS.

Most commonly used:

• Collection

  • Abstract (DACS 3.1 or EAD <abstract>)

  • Physical location (DACS 4.2)

  • Processing information (DACS 7.1.8)

  • Biographical/historical note (DACS 2.7)

  • Scope and Contents (DACS 3.1)

  • Arrangement (DACS 3.2)

  • Immediate Source of Acquisition (DACS 5.2)

  • Related Materials (DACS 6.3)

    • If needed

  • Conditions Governing Access (DACS 4.1)

  • Conditions Governing Use (DACS 4.4)

  • Preferred Citation (DACS 7.1.5)

• Series

  • Scope and Contents (DACS 3.1)

  • Arrangement (DACS 3.2)

• Item

  • Notes are not typically used at the item level unless there are certain circumstances, such as physical limitations or content warnings.

Physical Location

The physical location field will still read “The materials are located onsite in the department.” even if it is only a digital collection. Technically, the materials are located on the servers on campus, but that doesn’t mean that we change this language.

Publish Field

The publish field is inherited, but it's also…not.  Things have to be published at each individual level:

Collection (resource)

Series

Item

Everything lower than a collection will also indicate if it has an unpublished ancestor.

If it does have an unpublished ancestor, it will not appear even if it is indeed published. Parent components have to be published for their children to appear on the website.

Individual notes also have to be published:

And if it is a Multipart Note, each level has to be published: 

There is an option to “Publish All”, at the collection level, which causes all levels below collection to be published.

Do not use this feature if any series or files need to remain unpublished (perhaps due to an embargo or unprocessed materials). If you do use it, you will need to manually unpublish.  

Note: To ensure that a collection is updated in the access system (ArcLight aka what the user sees) overnight, you must toggle the publish button of the collection. This means if it is unpublished, click publish then unclick it and save and vice versa for a published collection. You do not need to actually publish or unpublish the collection, but by toggling the publish button you are changing the last modification time/date which is the trigger our system uses to update recently modified collections on the http://archives.albany.edu website. This ensures that our system doesn’t have to look through 1,000+ collections every night, just the ones modified in the last 24 hours!