Hi there,

Hoping this is the correct place to write! My institution is in the beginning phases of setting up our own CSpace instance, i.e. we're not hosted. I have a couple questions about authorities.

I have spent some time studying the records and user manual, but have not encountered how you actually change the authority/vocabularies. e.g. we use VIAF for names, not ULAN for names. I want to add AAT and FAST as authorities for Concept. My account has admin privileges so presumedly I should be able to change them. Am I just blind? Is there documentation to describe how to do this?

Additionally, am I correct in that there is no field for URIs for the authority terms? Initially, I had presumed the ID field could store this information, but based on the data dictionary that field should be used for the bibliographic source for e.g. a citation. In addition to making it easier to manage terms, the URI is quite important to me in that we use the same terms across now 3 different systems. That URI is the glue that connects them all so hoping there is a natural place for it in CSpace.

Thanks!
Olivia

Olivia Solis, MSIS (she/her/hers)
Metadata Coordinator
Dolph Briscoe Center for American History
The University of Texas at Austin
2300 Red River St. Stop D1100
Austin TX, 78712-1426
(512) 232-8013
tel:(415)%20314-0831

Good morning, Olivia,

My name is Jessi Weithman, and I’m the CollectionSpace Program Manager. I’d be happy to set up a time to discuss your authority work in more detail and share some experiences that I had in managing these data sets while I was in my previous position at Ohio History Connection serving as local administrator for their data migration and installation of CollectionSpace. I did significant work with their data set in establishing and sourcing authorities.

We did use the ID field combined with citation field to accomplish sourcing authorities.

However we are also in the process of restructuring the authorities. With the 7.2 release of CollectionSpace, we will be previewing some new fields to the authority record including a Resource identifier field and the ability to tag associated authorities. We will be previewing this only for a brand new chronology-based authority in 7.2, seeking feedback from community and then looking to implement across other authorities in a future release.

Please feel free to reach out to me via email: jessi.weithman@lyrasis.org (note I’ll be out of office in early July so I might be a little slow to respond). I’d love to learn more about your use case, and talk through your authority management in more detail.

Happy Friday!
Jessi