Currently, ArchivesSpace only exports top-level resources as MARCXML. Child resource components are available by exporting EAD container objects.
This is not ideal for our use case, as any post-processing and reformatting of EAD for consumption by OPACs is onerous. For example, EAD "flattens" subjects/agents (does not preserve datafield/subfields expected by consuming OPACs). Additionally, EAD output is monolithic; parsing several thousand container tags is onerous at best.
Can someone confirm whether this sort of task suitable for plugin development?
One use case I can think of for my institution is potentially exporting our barcoded top containers to be batch uploaded to our existing OPAC record as item records. It would be helpful!
Thanks, Lydia. There seems to be substantial interest in this issue. I'm going to slate it for discussion during our prioritization sub-team meeting on Thursday.
Can confirm that AS currently only exports top level for MARC. Enhancement could come through plugin or marc exporter upgrade.
Moving to implementation but ignoring 's comment for now.
As discussed in Dev Pri on 2019/07/30, the OAI service already provides the ability to export MARC for archival_objects. Unlike dc, dc_terms, and mods, the mapping for MARC is NOT handled in a separate OAI specific mapper, but rather handled in the primary export model in backend/app/exporters/models/marc21.rb . As such, it should be fairly trivial for a community developer to implement this change as it is likely all that is needed (at least at first pass) is building out the UI in the Staff Interface to provide a toolbar/button to trigger the exporter.