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

Besides the registry function regulated by these decrees, it is important to consider that the container list also functions as a public finding aid. In many cases, these lists represent the most detailed description of archival material and researchers can submit orders relying on them. Even the limits for researcher’s orders are set not only by the number of items but also by the number of archival boxes.

3 CONTAINER

LISTS IN BUDAPEST CITY ARCHIVES

3.1 Registrum

Before the Electronic Archives Project, container lists and archival registry of the Budapest City Archives were stored using a software called Registrum and accessible online on the webpage of the archives. Here, the “specific data elements” of the container list were attached in table format to the ISAD(G) description of the given fonds or subfonds, which already contained all the necessary “general data elements”. The columns of the table were: Sequential number, Storage unit (type of the container), Content unit, Articulation unit, Reference 1 and Reference 2. The first two columns were clearly used for the first two necessary data elements, but the use of the others varied with the type of archival material. The content unit was generally used for a title or description, while the articulation unit mostly contained the creation dates, although not in all cases. The Reference 1 and Reference 2 columns could contain material-specific data, but they were also often left empty. Although the rows of the table were already separate records in the database, archivists and researchers used them only in the visual form of the table, following the style of the old typed container lists.

3.2 Migration plans

During the Electronic Archives Project, the Budapest City Archives decided to unite, its many different databases in a new coherent system. As part of this process, all already public archival databases with no digital content had to be migrated into the scopeArchiv Archival Information System, the contents of the “Registrum” among them. The process was quite clear in case of the registry information, but it was less simple to find the best way to include the tables of container lists into this new system. Since the preparatory phase of the project took unexpectedly long, there was not much time left for implementation and migration: they had to take place almost simultaneously. That meant that the mode of the migration had to be decided upon before the new system could really become familiar in everyday practice—and there was also little time for cleaning or correcting the old databases.

The decision on the migration of the container lists had to take into account the following points:

a) automatic

migration should be possible with minimal manual interruption;

b) after

the migration further data changes, imports and exports should be easily manageable by the archivists themselves;

c) the

contents of the container list should be searchable for users through the scopeQuery;

d) the

container list should be usable as a register;

507