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.

Tehnicni in vsebinski problemi klasicnega in elektronskega arhiviranja, Radenci 2016

(and archivists kept on recommending) the old tables which were still available but not updated any more.

3.4 Mass correction campaign

After the conclusion of the project, everyday use of the migrated databases highlighted issues deserving attention. One of them was the demand for a more convenient container list format. There was no intention to redesign entirely the format chosen before; rather, all migrated container lists were to be corrected in the shortest possible time. The fact also had to be considered that the system had been by then in use for more than a full year and many correctable Units of Description records had already had connections to the Loans module, so they could not be simply deleted from the database. The task was not to change the migrated structure, but follow the already used logic of the reference codes and rewrite the existing records by their corrected form. However, in many cases even the reference codes had to be corrected. As already mentioned, the use of the old tables had relied on their visual impression, and in the very common case of many rows belonging to a container, the container data (ordinal number and type of storage unit) were indicated only in the first row of the container, leaving these fields empty in the rows below. Sometimes, when several containers belonged to the same storage unit type, the type was indicated only for the first. Since each row became a separate record in the course of the migration, the rows with empty first fields lost their container data. Lacking container data, their reference codes had to be corrected also, so they could not be overwritten.

Picture 1: Container list in the “

Regi st

rum” with many empty fields and an extra row

8. Raktári

jegyzék

Sorszám

Tárolási egység

Tartalmi egység

Tagolási egység

Jelzet 1

Jelzet 2

Elnöki-Elnöki ügyosztályi iratok

1873-1911

1

doboz

iratok

1873.

1-599

2

1874.

1-475

3

476-950

4

951-1.400

3.4.1 Formal correction

The mass correction campaign targeted the most obvious problem: the inadequate use of fields. As all content information was stored together in a userdefined field, these could be seen only in full view—a big step backwards from the previously used tables, both for archivists and researchers. But, the same amount of information could be suitably displayed in the system’s “favourite” fields: title and time of creation, visible in all views, and “contents” that appears at least in list view both in the scopeArchiv and the scopeQuery search result lists. Therefore, we wanted to use only these three fields for container list records besides the two types of reference codes. This could have been easily defined already for the migration, had the archivists had sufficient time to unify the use of the columns in 509