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

Picture 3: Many archival units in the same container: before and after

3.4.3.3 Databases and item-level archival descriptions

Apart from the necessary container lists for many parts of the archival material, we also possess more detailed finding aids and databases. The previously already online accessible databases of the Budapest City Archives were also migrated to the new system within the Electronic Archives project: those with digital content (mainly pictures) were ingested into the Tessella SDB (now Preservica), but the rest were imported to the Units of Description module of the scopeArchiv and were placed, if their records could be fitted into the archival plan hierarchy, on levels below the migrated registry. In these cases, the migration resulted in two parallel structures below the fonds or subfonds: the container list and the database. During the revision, it is up to the archivists to decide whether to combine them or not:

a) The

easiest, but perhaps confusing, option is to maintain the migrated status and keep the two parallel structures side by side.

b) According

to the new regulation it is also acceptable not to keep the container list but establish the connection between the database records and the Containers module.

c) The

two structure can also be merged in cases when, for example, the database has no hierarchical structure in itself, but contains hundreds of records on the same level. Then it can be made more transparent by adding technical levels—and containers can be used as such technical levels.

The options for the import of other finding aids or lists of item-level archival descriptions are the same as for container lists with many rows for each container or databases without inner hierarchy.

4 CONCLUSION

The mass correction of the migrated container lists was a priority task for the year 2015. About 4500 container lists have been corrected so far, some of which consists of a single record while others contain nearly 7000 rows. By the end of last year 280279 of the 457604 “container list” type records of the scopeArchiv were already converted to the new form—and many of the migrated “container list” records were replaced by archival units connected to the Containers module.

The necessity to formally check all container lists also presented a good opportunity to correct their contents and to get rid of many structural problems inherited from earlier solutions and databases. Although the completion of these preparatory tasks before the first migration to scopeArchiv could have saved us the 512