{"id":3442,"date":"2011-05-20T13:38:49","date_gmt":"2011-05-20T13:38:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/apps.lib.ua.edu\/blogs\/digitalservices\/?p=62"},"modified":"2011-05-20T13:38:49","modified_gmt":"2011-05-20T13:38:49","slug":"but-what-if-i-have-lots-of-fred-jones-letters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/apps.lib.ua.edu\/blogs\/coolathoole\/2011\/05\/20\/but-what-if-i-have-lots-of-fred-jones-letters\/","title":{"rendered":"But… what if I have lots of Fred Jones letters?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Or… what if I have Fred Jones Letters in different collections?<\/p>\n

Or… what if I have Fred Jones photographs, letters, audio tapes and more?<\/p>\n

The way we deal with this is to identify the item within a collection by an incremental number.\u00a0 After all — the letter could be from<\/strong><\/em> Fred or to <\/strong><\/em>Fred;\u00a0 it could have been sent on this date or that;\u00a0 it could be categorized as a legal document, a love letter, a receipt — there’s all kinds of ways to categorize things.<\/p>\n

So, we decided to put in the file name only the information we need in order to manage the files.\u00a0 We depend on the metadata (descriptive information) to let the user decide (via search\/browse\/retrieval ) what’s important to him or her.<\/p>\n

We do the same with collections<\/a>:\u00a0 we’ve found that even our collection names get corrected or modified from time to time, and we even have a couple of collections ( u3_298<\/a> and u3_1328<\/a>) with the same name!\u00a0 Now tell me that’s not confusing!\u00a0 So, our collections all have numbers.\u00a0 When possible, they reflect the collection number assigned by the archivists to the physical (analog) content… so Manuscript collection # 212 becomes digital collection #212 within the manuscript type of content.<\/p>\n

One of the cool things about Acumen<\/a> is that if the collection number is in the file name, it will automatically group content for the collection together.<\/p>\n

And if the type of material is in the file name, Acumen will group types of content together.<\/p>\n

Acumen<\/a> is pretty cool about making sense of your archive by inferring relationships based on file names.\u00a0 It makes life a lot easier.<\/p>\n

If you look at our entry page,<\/a> you’ll see tabs across the top for audio, books, finding aids, images, manuscript materials, sheet music, and more.\u00a0 That’s what I mean by types.<\/p>\n