[Archon-L] Collection Custom Fields

[Daniel Laughland]

Well for example we have one finding aid for our Charles Ellis papers. He's
best known for his involvement with the Golden Gate bridge project, so we
have an appendix of other people involved with that project and other
collections at other institutions related to the Golden Gate. For any
authors in our collections, we often have an appendix listing books they've
written or movies they've directed. For our PDF finding aids, we often had a
large graphic on the title page and I was hoping to keep that displayed on
the controlcard page somewhere. At the moment I'm doing that with the
Digital Library feature. (Thank you for the $db object, whoever coded that.)

Looking across all our finding aids, I don't think we have more than four of
these appendix sections anywhere. If we do, they can probably be combined.
The field titles are, as I indicated, pretty widely varied. I'm a
programmer, not a librarian, so I can't speak for all our possibilities.

I'm curious, if I enter HTML tags in any of the larger fields on the Admin
side, will they be stripped out on their way to the database, or only when
displayed for EAD/MARC? We're focusing more on our public display side than
our EAD, and I'm considering putting a couple TinyMCE editors in the admin
page so we can make those longer blocks of text stand out with section
headings and the like. 

Daniel Laughland
dlaughla at purdue.edu
Purdue University Libraries
Archives and Special Collections
http://www.lib.purdue.edu/spcol


-----Original Message-----
From: archon-bounces at archon.org [mailto:archon-bounces at archon.org] On Behalf
Of Chris Prom
Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2007 9:51 AM
To: archon at archon.org
Subject: Re: [Archon-L] Collection Custom Fields

Daniel,

Can you tell me what type of field titles you need to define? 
We were pretty conscious about making sure that all of the 
EAD/DACS fields were represented, and in fact I debated whether 
it would be desireable to add a few 'user defined fields' at the 
collection level, since institutions may have data they want to 
manage outside of the public interface.  (I should also note that 
it is possible to supress the view of some of the current fields, 
if you want to do that, by tweaking the files 
'controlcard.inc.php' and findingaid.inc.php in your templates 
folder)

Anyway, We can consider adding some user-defined fields as a 
possibility for the next release--I would not recommending 
tinkering with the code in the API because as you say it will 
cause you a very big headache later--but before we do this, I'd 
like to see if there is another option, or get some sense from 
those using Archon as to how many of these user defined 
fields would be sufficient?

Thanks,

Chris

--

Christopher J. Prom
Assistant University Archivist
University of Illinois Archives
19 Library
1408 W. Gregory Dr.
Urbana, IL 61801

phone:	217.333.0798
fax:	217.333.2868
e-mail:	prom at uiuc.edu
web:	http://web.library.uiuc.edu/ahx

On Mon, 26 Feb 2007 dlaughla at purdue.edu wrote:

>
> At Purdue, we don't have an archival policy, so we don't have very many
> collections to create finding aids for; just the "campus celebrities," as
it
> were. We've typically included appendices with a page or two of
biographical
> information as well as lists of publications, films, or other relevant
> information to researchers.
>
> Archon has a generic "Other information" field, but we'd like to have
several of
> those, with field titles we can edit. That feature exists on the
> series/box/folder level, but not on the collection level from what I can
tell.
> They don't need to appear in the EAD output (since there isn't really a
place
> for them) but we would like to display them in the public interface.
>
> I could dive into the code and figure out how to add them myself
(preparing
> myself for an aneurysm come upgrade time), but I'm wondering if there's an
> easier way, or if you were planning to add that in the next version
anyways.
>
> Thanks,
> Daniel Laughland
> dlaughla at purdue.edu
> Purdue University Libraries
> Archives and Special Collections
> http://www.lib.purdue.edu/spcol
>
> _______________________________________________
> Archon mailing list
> Archon at archon.org
> http://archon.org/mailman/listinfo/archon_archon.org
>

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