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Email 1 - a thread between Patrick and Megan

Patrick –

Might be easier to have a call about this – it seems that some of the below questions conflate storage location with geographic location (should be two separate authority files), but my answers are in line.

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This is just a start to the questions I have been wondering about. I really need some help clarifying the 1.0 functionality. I know it is kind of overwhelming, but I need to nail down some set of constraints on what is in and what is out. If something is out for 1.0 but we know we should do it, that is important to our approach (allowing for expansion). If something seems just plain wrong, that would be useful too.

Thanks - Patrick

EMail 2 from Patrick

The StorageLocation schema described at: http://wiki.collectionspace.org/display/collectionspace/Storage+Location+Schema is really confusing to me. Why would we duplicate all the hierarchy of structure into every record? This looks like a hierarchy to me, but if we store it this way, it will be harder to benefit from the hierarchy in search (since things like units and shelve numbers are just text, and not concepts linked into a hierarchy). It will be hard to represent a hierarchy as well, since we would have to build it from the text, on the fly. Doing things like searching for objects that are nearby, or objects near the floor (e.g., in case of flooding) becomes much harder.

The current model seems to struggle a bit with this, as there is an entry for both tray and box, when I would think that the storage would tend to be one or the other. Also, there is no way to have boxes within boxes, without extending the schema and all the associated code. I cannot imagine how the archivists would work with this.

I had assumed that there would be a hierarchy of concepts, perhaps typed to reflect concepts like a "room" and a "shelf". This would allow for easy extension: boxes in boxes, and sheets in envelopes in folders in boxes as the archivists require. It would make it much easier to move a shelf or shelving unit, since only one record (the shelf item) must be updated, instead of a ton of locations that all reference the unit.

This would leverage the same functionality that supports geo location, taxonomy, and others.

Because there is one place to describe a room or unit, the risk of mistakes with duplicates or misspellings is greatly reduced. Because it leverages functionality we're building elsewhere, we can ask questions like "what is stored near object X"? We can also more easily associated barcodes with items like Units, Shelves, boxes, trays, etc. The current model would make that functionality kind of messy to support.

I have seen systems that model taxonomy this was as well, forcing users to fill in the whole taxonomic tree for each specimen. This seems incredibly painful to me.