Fremantle
The first folder of the C.F. Barker Archives' material is done: finished scanning and initial entry into ArchivesWiki. This is my attempt to use MediaWiki as a digital archive platform for physical records (and digitally-created ones, although they don’t feature as much in the physical folders). It’s reasonably satisfactory so far, although there’s lots that’s a bit frustrating. I’m attempting to document what I’m doing (in a Wikibook), and there’s more to figure out.
There are a few key parts to it; two stand out as a bit weird. Firstly, the structure of access control is that completely separate wikis are created for each group of access required. This can make it tricky linking things together, but makes for much clearer separation of privacy, and almost removes the possibility of things being inadvertently made public when they shouldn’t be. The second is that the File namespace is not used at all for file descriptions. Files are considered more like ‘attachments’ and their metadata is contained on main-namespace pages, where the files are displayed. This means that files are _not_ considered to be archival items (except of course when they are; i.e. digitally-created ones!), but just representations of them, and for example multiple file types or differently cropped photos can all appear on a single item’s record. The basic idea is to have a single page that encapsulates the entire item (it doesn’t matter if the item is just a single photograph, and the system also works when the ‘item’ is an aggregate item of, for example, a whole box of photos being accessioned into ArchivesWiki).