Thanks for sharing this Mark. At the University of Minnesota, we are in the early stages of doing some agent record clean-up as well, so this information is very useful.
For one project we were looking at doing with our agents, we wanted to create a report of all of our agent records that would also include the biographical /historical notes from any linked resource records (or at least the URLs to any associated resource records, so we could easily find the relevant bio/hist notes). Our instance of ArchivesSpace is hosted by Lyrasis so we contacted them to ask about it and were told this is "not possible." I found that surprising and wonder if anyone else has done something like this and if so, how. / Lara Friedman-Shedlov On Mon, May 18, 2020 at 4:00 PM Custer, Mark <mark.cus...@yale.edu> wrote: > All, > > > > Is anyone else working on Agent-related cleanup projects in ArchivesSpace > right now? We’ve got a couple of those going on at Yale, and I wanted to > mention one of them on this listserv since I said that I would last night > on Twitter 😊. My reasoning was that it would be better to share widely, > even early on, in the likely event that others were working on similar > projects, and in hopes that it might save time for anyone else looking to > get started with such a project. > > > > Anyhow, just for the sake of sharing, here’s a really hacky SQL database > query that you can use in ArchivesSpace to get a list of agents that have > any name forms that include “Mrs.” or “Miss”: > https://gist.github.com/fordmadox/d78656fceb04b62000b662a3f2464488 > > > > A few caveats: > > - I do **not** know SQL very well, so I know that this could be > improved dramatically, but it gets data out of ArchivesSpace. > - The query casts a rather wide net, since it looks for Mrs. or Miss > in any of the name forms, but it could be altered to just look for those > two terms in the “sort_name” only if desired. > - The result of the query has at least one Yale-specific field in > there, since we store our local ILS bibliographic IDs in ASpace’s “user > defined string 2” field. You can ignore that, or add something else, etc., > but the gist is that this query should work in any ASpace instance. It > should return one row per agent, with multiple name forms, and a bit more > information like which Resources, Archival Objects, and/or Accessions the > agent is linked to. > - And last, it just searches for variations of “Mrs.” and “Miss”, > which works for our dataset, but you could modify the HAVING clause at the > end of the query to search for other honorific terms, if needed. > > > > Most importantly, though, getting a dataset to review and act on is just > the first step. The hard work comes next! Jessica Tai, Alison Clemens, > and Karen Spicher are spearheading this project at Yale. If anyone has > specific questions about the project, I’d encourage you to reach out > directly to them. > > > > For now, though, here’s one interesting example from the project: we’ve > got an agent record now in ArchivesSpace for “Brady, John G., Mrs.”, > https://archives.yale.edu/agents/people/77599. Originally this would > just have been text in the finding aid, later a link in a catalog record, > and now it’s full-blown, standalone record for a person in ArchivesSpace. > But nowhere in that agent record is her given name, Elizabeth, although her > name is thankfully listed multiple times in the finding aid (check out the > finding aid author! 😊), in the Wikipedia entry for John Green Brady, and > elsewhere. So, that agent record will eventually be one of a few hundred > local records that we update in ArchivesSpace during the course of this > project. And, one of the things that I like about ArchivesSpace --which > helps to make sure that this project is possible without too many > workarounds-- is that even if an agent record has a corresponding > authority record in, say, the Library of Congress name authority file (e.g. > http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n2008076910), you can still choose to > use a different name variant for that agent’s display name, rather than an > authorized heading. > > > > Anyhow, I hope all is doing well! > > > > Mark > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Archivesspace_Users_Group mailing list > Archivesspace_Users_Group@lyralists.lyrasis.org > http://lyralists.lyrasis.org/mailman/listinfo/archivesspace_users_group > -- Lara D. Friedman-Shedlov (she, her, hers) Description and Access Archivist | Kautz Family YMCA Archives | www.lib.umn.edu/ymca Digital Records Archivist | Archives & Special Collections | www.lib.umn.edu/special University of Minnesota Libraries | lib.umn.edu | 612.626.7972
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