Keeping timestamps and creator names from AT

If you’ve already migrated from Archivists’ Toolkit to ArchivesSpace, you know that timestamps on your records will be reset to the time of migration, and the name associated with the creator of the record will be changed to “admin.” Here at Yale, since accessioning is such a serious activity (after all, it’s the moment when we take legal, physical, and intellectual control of records), we wanted to keep that information in ArchivesSpace. At this time, we’re fine for only having this for accession records, although this technique could be modified for other records, too.

This was a project for Adam Shahrani, Mark Custer, and myself. And basically, with Adam’s patient assistance, we just wrote a SQL script to select cognate values from Archivists’ Toolkit and ArchivesSpace, and update the ASpace values with AT values.

The script for that is here, on GitHub. All relevant warnings apply. Obviously, you’ll need to update schema names. The other thing is that we did this in an environment where both databases were on the same server (localhost). Doing this update across servers would be more complicated.

And here’s what it looks like:

Screen Shot 2015-05-01 at 10.20.25 AM

 

Check out those sweet timestamps from 2012!

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