A Series of Unfortunate Events

Being new to archives, assigning series and subseries kind of throws me for a loop. My brain thinks “subject headings” and “classification” — “many” and “one” — describing an object and putting it in its place. The world of series and folders is sometimes confusing, even more so now that we’re creating records in the museum’s database, which is not created for — and not ideal for — archival material. For example, there is no established hierarchical relationship between box level records and objects/items, or between objects/items and their pieces. This relationship is demonstrated by the accession number, but the database design makes it difficult to apply consistent metadata to the objects. The problem with the series is that the database only allows for two levels, whereas our list of series and subseries — or categories and object headings — is a locally developed, multi-level vocabulary based on the AAT. We follow the rule of applying the narrowest heading possible. If I catalog a purse, I apply the subseries “purses (bags),” and it lives in the series “costume/personal accessories.” Under this series — between “costume/personal accessories” and “purses (bags)” — is also the subseries “bags.” However, if someone searches just for “bags,” the purse will not show up because the vocabulary and hierarchical structure is not built into the database. We need to look at the database more carefully to figure out if there is another way — hopefully a simple way — to create a combined search to take care of this. It may just come down to our friend Keyword.