Fremantle
· archiving · catalogues · access control ·
I've been working on cataloguing a bunch of (physical) archival records recently, working through various boxes without really knowing beforehand what is to come. 90% are public, but now and then there are documents that need to be kept private. That's fine, there is a private place to catalogue those — but the system being what it is, the public catalogue is online and the private one is not. Which makes for good security, but it's a split in identifiers and an open question about how to represent the gaps that appear in the public catalogue.
The current way to approach it looks like it'll be duplicating the private identifiers on the public catalogue but not putting in any info about them. Then, all their info gets added to the private catalogue (but vice versa is not done: there's no need to represent all public items in the private catalogue, I guess the idea being that anyone with access to that also has access to the public side).
The goal is that for each long-term storage box it's possible to get an ordered list of what's in it. That list will actually have to be multiple, but it seems like it's all going to work.
The other aspect that's come up is how to add in — sometimes much later on — things like missing pages of documents that have already been accessioned. So far, this has been done pretty sneakily, with them being catalogued (and their scans uploaded to) the older catalogue record, but then the wayward pages being stored in whatever box is currently being appended to. This is not great, as although the entire original document is recorded together (that's nice) it means that there's no record in the per-box list of the missing pages! Not nice.
The fix to that seems to be to create records for each of the separated parts of the document. Then they're just like separate items, albeit ones that have a very close relationship. That feels most solid and just means that each needs to point to the other (and that's something that happens with different items all the time anyway).
So, in summary:
- The public catalogue gets 'shadow' items that point to the private catalogue.
- Each storage box gets its (multiple) lists of contents.
- Any parts of a document that are separate (either in the original order, or where they're now stored) result in multiple catalogue items.