Only  "not possible" through the ArchivesSpace reporting interface currently. 
Though maybe possible in the future.
Almost certainly possible to create a CSV report directly from the database, 
but haven't looked into the details on that yet.
________________________________
From: archivesspace_users_group-boun...@lyralists.lyrasis.org 
<archivesspace_users_group-boun...@lyralists.lyrasis.org> on behalf of Lara 
Friedman-Shedlov <l...@umn.edu>
Sent: Monday, May 18, 2020 5:06 PM
To: Archivesspace Users Group <archivesspace_users_group@lyralists.lyrasis.org>
Subject: Re: [Archivesspace_Users_Group] Mrs. Husband's Name / updates in our 
ArchivesSpace database

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<mailto: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





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--
Lara D. Friedman-Shedlov    (she, her, hers)
Description and Access Archivist | Kautz Family YMCA Archives | 
www.lib.umn.edu/ymca<http://www.lib.umn.edu/ymca>
Digital Records Archivist | Archives & Special Collections | 
www.lib.umn.edu/special<http://www.lib.umn.edu/special>
University of Minnesota Libraries | lib.umn.edu<http://lib.umn.edu> | 
612.626.7972



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