Archives space has been by far the most challenging part of this whole experience. Upon my return to work on Monday morning, I sat down with Lisa to look over the work I had down on ArchivesSpace. Overall I did a pretty good job of inputting all of the collections information, but there was one issue that put me back.
I myself am still unsure about what happened and I will do my best to explain what I did…
When inputting folders into ArchivesSpace, every folder needs a top container. A top container tells us where each folder can be found and in what series. For example if I had a folder labeled box: 2 belonging to series 3, the top container would say box: 2, series 3 (Simple right!). My issue came when was looking at the drop down options for the top container and there was no series 2. So what I did, unknowingly, was I created new top containers for each folder. I ended up creating 138 top containers when I only needed 13. Lisa noticed what I did and tried to fix the top containers, but she ran into the same problem I did. She was also not able to locate any top containers after series 1. The next day after some troubleshooting, Lisa was able to fix the drop down options and delete all 138 top containers. I then went back into ArchivesSpace and put in the new top containers which were now in the drop down options.
Although it took me a while to input the new top containers, I was grateful I did not have to redo the whole collection. Although I had to redo series 2-5, there were not a lot of folders within those series. I was grateful I did not have to redo series 1, which is triple to size of series 2-5 put together.