Dev Pri recommends passing.

Community feedback demonstrates use-cases that include a mix of instance and spawned types. The ticket was originally expanded to include all types of instances (top containers and digital objects). In addition, the request was further expanded to all types of spawned records (resources, archival objects, and accession).

These considerations do not address selecting specific instance records during the spawn event. This means that users would not be able to select a sub-set of instance records or a specific type of instance record.

1. I can see a use-case for this function in my institution, since we create digital object records during accessioning that are later linked to the resource record (or AOs) during processing. This would help cut down somewhat on the re-linking problem I brought up in

2. I second Wendy’s point, but would propose adding a fourth option: Share. “Transfer” would presumably unlink the instance from the accession; “Share” would leave it linked to both the resource and the accession.

Just one follow-up comment. To accommodate all workflow and processing scenarios, this feature needs to have three options: Transfer / Copy / Do not transfer or copy. Then it could be safely incorporated into core code, rather than as a plugin, which can be burdensome for smaller institutions to support. I often see this question come up on the listserv, as it is such a fundamental part of our work. Many archives would use this functionality daily. Might you consider escalating the Priority level from Minor to Major?

We discussed this at our NYU ArchivesSpace administrators group, and our consensus was a concern about the variability of local practice around stabilization and collection management activities during accessioning, such that perhaps this might be more suitable for a plugin than an inclusion into the core code.

We do find discomfort in the copying option, and feel like transferring instances from an accession record to a resource record makes more sense to us of all of the options presented. We also wondered if this functionality would apply to the functionality to spawn an accession record into an archival object; if so, we foresee potential problems with repeated box numbering.

All of that said, at NYU we do not attach containers to accession records, so our discussion was more hypothetical and ultimately, something we could simply ignore if it were to be newly developed functionality of the application.

The consensus among the processing archivists at my institution is that the ideal would be a checkbox step where we get to choose which of any data from the accession populates the spawned resource (similar to the Bulk Edit Spreadsheet plugin), but we recognize this might be out of scope for this ticket. The Transfer instances option would be best for us, since it would eliminate one of our many processing wrap-up steps.