Orthmayr Flóra: The Lowest Levels of Archival Hierarchy: Adapting the Container List to ScopeArchiv. In: Nina Gostenčnik (szerk.): Tehnični in vsebinski problemi klasičnega in elektronskega arhiviranja. Popisovanje arhivskega gradiva. Zbornik mednarodne konference. Maribor, 2016. 505–514.
F. Orthmayr: The Lowest Levels of Archival Hierarchy e) the container list should be usable as a finding aid and its units should be orderable for researchers; f) the container list should be printable in the form required by the then operative 10/2002. (IV. 13.) NKÖM decree. The logic of the archival structure and the normal use of scopeArchiv functions would have suggested that all archival units down to the lowest levels be represented as part of archival hierarchy in the Units of Description module and connected to their containers in the Containers module. That would have been perhaps the professionally most suitable solution and can still be a goal for the future, but it was not a viable option for the mass migration process. Even if it had been possible to accomplish, the production of the then still required printed container lists would have been very difficult. An easy but far less elegant option was to give up the separate records, keep the list form as it was, and put all this in a single memo field among the data of the given fonds or subfonds. Researchers could find it where it used to be (perhaps in a less appealing visual form) but the system would not recognize levels below the registry and all orders should be placed in text form. Although, obviously not practical in the long run, this option could have been accepted as a temporary solution until the previously described ideal version can be realized. A bit similar choice is to attach the old printable lists as documents to the registry levels in the Units of Description module—this was the temporary solution chosen by the National Archives. The third way, that was finally opted for, in this phase of planning was to migrate the containers into the Units of Description module, allotting each container a separate record below the registry levels, with connection to itself in the Containers module. The data fields, which describe the contents of the archival units (Content unit, Articulation unit, Reference 1, Reference 2) would be imported into one field. Because there can be more rows (more than one archival units) for each container, this field should be repeatable. In this way, full containers could be normally ordered, but requesting only one archival unit from a container could be done only by placing an order in text form. 3.3 Implemented migration method The implemented solution was partly based on this third option, except that not only all containers, but all rows of the container lists were migrated as separate records. Still, the idea of uniting the four descriptive columns in a single field was kept. In this way, in a migrated record of a container list the ordinal number and type of the storage unit appear in separate fields and also as the part of the reference code of the record, but all further data is listed in one memo field. Because it could not be warranted that the title and the creation date would always appear in the same column and especially not that the latter would be in any standard format, these also ended up in the memo field: none of the migrated “container list” records had any data in the creation date field, and all carried the title “Container list”. In this way, the data was searchable and all units inside the containers could be ordered separately, but the details appeared only in full view: neither list view, nor archival plan view showed the contents of the record, only the reference code and container data. Not surprisingly, researchers kept on using 508
