Tim Schofield is a Senior Developer for Max Communications.
Max are working with Imperial College London Archives and Corporate Records Unit (ICL ACRU) digitally preserving their documentation. We use Archivematica for digital preservation in tandem with AtoM as an access system.
The project set out to improve Archivematica’s reporting ability by developing an in-house QueryBuilder utility. The QueryBuilder enables the user to create compound queries and interrogate Archivematica’s database. For instance, searches can be run returning all packages created within a particular date-range, or packages over a certain size, or created by a particular user.
These basic searches can then be combined using Boolean operators into more complex searches: “Give me all AIP packages made by Tim over 100 MB OR all DIP packages made by Frank less than 50 MB”. This was Phase 1 of development.
The documents undergoing digital preservation at ICL are the product of any number of departments, faculties, services and schools. In Phase 2 of the project, which is currently under way, in consultation with the ICL team we decided to extend the QueryBuilder to allow AIPs and DIPs to be tagged with the name of their institutional creator. Following deployment, this new function will enable searches such as “Show all AIPs created in 2019 by The Centre for Academic English” or “Show all AIPs produced by Tim for The Early Years Education Centre”.
When a package has been tagged with its institutional creator it can be assigned other associated tags using authority files. This includes the creator department’s related units or previous manifestations. For instance, The Centre for Languages, Culture and Communication, the Graduate School and the Library are all related units of The Centre for Academic English.
Once a query has been run using the tags, e.g. “Show all AIPs created in 2019 by the Graduate School of The Centre for Academic English” reports can be generated and exported in either CSV format or as a PDF.
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