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Showing posts from January, 2017

Creating an annual accessions report using AtoM

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So, it is that time of year where we need to complete our annual report on accessions for the National Archives. Along with lots of other archives across the UK we send The National Archives summary information about all the accessions we have received over the course of the previous year. This information is collated and provided online on the Accessions to Repositories website for all to see. The creation of this report has always been a bit time consuming for our archivists, involving a lot of manual steps and some re-typing but since we have started using AtoM as our Archival Management System the process has become much more straightforward. As I've reported in a previous blog post , AtoM does not do all that we want to do in the way of reporting via it's front end. However, AtoM has an underlying MySQL database and there is nothing to stop you bypassing the interface, looking at the data behind the scenes and pulling out all the information you need. One of the things we

Hello 2017

Looking back 2016 was a busy year. I can tell that from just looking at my untidy desk...I was going to include a photo at this point but that would be too embarrassing. The highlights of 2016 for me were getting our AtoM catalogue released and available to the world in April, completing Filling the Digital Preservation Gap (and seeing the project move from the early 'thinking' phases to actual implementation) and of course having our work on this project shortlisted in the Research and Innovation category of the Digital Preservation Awards . ...but other things happened too. Blogging really is a great way of keeping track of what I've been working on and of course what people are most interested to read about. The top 5 most viewed posts from 2016 on this blog have been as follows: Research Data - what does it *really* look like?  - A post describing my (not entirely successful) efforts to automatically identify the file formats of research data deposited with Research Da