Connecting to Collections Care Online Community

PastPerfect "status" field and authority files

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    • #135012
      Lacey Czeluscinski
      Participant

      Hi everyone

      I’m a brand new registrar. I’m going through PastPerfect at my institution and I’ve had to clean up a lot of the authority files. However, there is surprisingly little information (I’ve been able to find) on terminology control for the “status” field in PastPerfect. It seems like an incredibly vague field, used to denote everything from “OK” to “Needs Conservation” to “not in its home” (This was really an authority file option).

      Anyone want to share their status authority file list with me? Or better yet, does anyone know what the “factory settings” status authority file is???

      Thanks!

    • #135013
      Michael Nagy
      Participant

      So this one is a little tricky because even though there are authority record field reports in PP, “status” is not a report. This is odd, since it is a common authority field for all 4 catalogs. The only way to see the options is to open a record, edit, right click the status field, and see what is available. If this authority list has been altered then you will not know which have been added or deleted. I think the best option to find out what the default choices are is to download the PP5 evaluation edition from the website. http://museumsoftware.com/pp5eval.html
      This should have the default fields unchanged. (I don’t know the defaults myself as we imported data from another program and our existing status elements were added to the authority on import.) Make sure the download is saved somewhere other than your PP5 folder that stores your actual collection data. In the evaluation software, open a record, edit, right click status, and see what you have.

    • #135015
      Carolyn Schimandle
      Participant

      While having a set authority file for this field is a good idea, tweaking it to match your institution’s needs also is a good idea. The trick is to make all the PastPerfect data entry personnel stick with the list and use the terms consistently. SOMEDAY I hope to do that! In our institution, where we are just diving into a brand-new extensive collection, we use “TBD” a lot, which is just a flag to look at the notes on the Notes/Legal tab and get more information. It’s our version of Facebook’s relationship status “It’s complicated.” As we get things more organized, we’ll get more sophisticated and specific.

    • #135088
      Lacey Czeluscinski
      Participant

      Ha! Carolyn you made me laugh!

      Thanks so much for your responses guys. Mainly, I wanted to see “factory settings” so I could start from a neutral playing field and *then* make changes to suit my institution’s individual collection.

      Now that I’ve been here two months, I feel just generally more confident in being able to assess my collections needs. I’ve deleted every field I haven’t used and have only really added one,” Needs remediation.”

      However, Michael, that is REALLY weird you can’t run a report on it. I guess that negates my “remediation” flag. Really… that negates a lot of the usefulness of that field. Though I guess if you wanted to review a specific collection (we have hundreds, but maybe for a diff museum), you could just print a Browse form that lists it to highlight the “flag” of your choice.

      Thanks guys!

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