2019-04-03 UAC Reports Open Call

Please join us for an ArchivesSpace open call discussion focused on reports.  The User Advisory Council Reports sub-team is interested in learning about the community's use of the existing reports, use cases, and pain points. The sub-team will use this feedback to inform their next steps.

Date

April 3, 2019

1:00 p.m. EDT / noon CDT / 11:00 MDT / 10:00 a.m. PDT

Held via Zoom, 25 participants

audio recording | chat log

Connection information

Join Zoom Meeting
https://zoom.us/j/926134522

Dial by your location (if you cannot connect to the audio with your computer)
+1 646 876 9923 US (New York)
+1 669 900 6833 US (San Jose)
Meeting ID: 926 134 522
Find your local number: https://zoom.us/u/abY0PUiwRs

Discussion items

Question or discussion pointNotes from discussion

Pre-defined Reports




Which of the reports do you use in AS?  For what purposes?

Which of the reports do you use in AS?  For what purposes?


Current preexisting reports: https://archivesspace.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/AC/pages/101847232/Reports+Subteam+Recommendations+for+Predefined+Reports#


AP Corp. archives - We use accessions report to get our statistics at the end of year. We have about 300 collections, 4,000 linear feet. Paper, artifacts, oral histories, video, etc.


NYU - We have only been using Location Holdings for paging. The others were either previously not working or not exactly what we needed for other parts of our work. 


Clemson – Currently not using reports


University of Kansas- Kenneth Spencer Research Library (Marcella) - I've used the accessions list report to get a basic intellectual control over unprocessed accessions.  We now generate our own accessions report from SQL queries in order to ensure I know about all entered accessions in ArchivesSpace and can account for them, intellectually. Most of the other given reports have not suited our needs/not been working right until recently.



UVA – (Steve) We have added custom/CollectionManagementSubreport to resources_list_report  and use that a lot.  Did this through a plug in. Also customized a user permissions report (submitted community pull request to add to the next version of ArchivesSpace).





Which reports do you need most frequently?  For what purposes?

Purdue (Matt) – Systems gets requests from archivists across repositories for custom reports, specifically for inventory and location purposes.

Are there reports you have purposefully chosen to never use and why?


Are there reports you have used but chosen not to continue using and why?


Are there other use cases where you wish there was a report but there isn’t?

Laurel McPhee would like to see a way for all data sets to be exported as CSV.


Several comments were made about general confusion related to the number of reports and the changes to certain reports (re: shelf list) that have changed recently.



University of Kansas -  (Marcella) I would LOVE a report on archival objects associated with containers (i.e., I want to know all folders supposed to be in box X within a resource record) - the csv that you're supposed to be able to download from the search results when trying to hunt down all linked objects to top containers does NOT work, and I recently had to sort out an issue where folders were mistakenly associated with the wrong top container. Being able to actually spit out a csv with just top container, titles of archival objects associated with that top container, and child information associated with those archival objects would be SUPER helpful.


Laney mentioned the parameters in the holdings report were removed in the latest update but can be readded.

If you aren’t using the reports, why?




Custom Reports


What limits are acceptable for custom reports? What is required? In order to be helpful, how customizable does it have to be?  (Functionality like this becomes less functional in practice at a certain point (i.e. crashing) )

Nancy Enneking pointed out the need for out of the box reports for members with limited tech resources and the development of more involved customized reporting features that require more developer and systems assistance has always been a balancing act for the reports sub-team.


NYU (Rachel) - Re: customization - I'd love to have a more modular option to reporting based on certain types of record types. Like, selecting an Accession Report, then identifying the fields you want, and setting any scoping parameters. It feels like that is sort of on the fuzzy boundary between changing the reports and customization.


AP Corporate Archives - would like some "reports" that are different ways to look at a particular record - a combination of filtering searches or record views and reports to pick up more than what is there right now

Action Items:  

The committee will compile this information and use the comments to decide if and how to execute a survey to get a better understanding of what the members would like to see moving forward for reports.