Multiple items packaged together

Instructions for resolving the issue of multiple items being packaged together

The issue

Item-level records are the orderable units we use at Wellcome, i.e. the thing that can be requested by users.

Each item is packaged appropriately and when it is requested by a user, it is delivered within that packaging. For safety and preservation reasons, users cannot request partial items: they request and receive an entire item.

Multiple items packaged together is a problem, because it either requires an item to be removed from it's packaging in order to be retrieved (bad for security and preservation), or it requires all the items to be retrieved and brought to the RMR. This is bad for location & movement control as these other items will not have been requested and not have an audit trail when they are moved. It also causes problems if these other items are requested by other users.

Solution 1: packaging each item separately

Often the most straightforward solution is to repackage the items so that each one is packaged separately.

See the repackaging instructions in the Archive Cataloguing Gitbook for guidance.

If the resulting repackaging means the items no longer fit in the box, an additional box will need to be used:

• Put the excess material in the new box. Check Calm and/or the physical material to see what the next box number in the sequence should be.

• Create a box label listing the relevant PublicRefs and giving the box number.

• Update the Calm BoxNumber field with the new box number for the relevant items

• Contact the Storage Manager for a stacks location for the new box. Update the Calm location field with the new location.

Solution 2: recatalogue the physical package as the item

Solution 1 is often the preferred solution, but if a large number of items are packaged together and splitting them would be too time consuming, then recataloguing the material is an option.

In this solution, instead of having several Calm item records, there will be one record which aggregates the items (and the items effectively become piece records).

Example:

A series contains 6 item records, 4 of which are packaged together: PP/ABC/A/1/1; PP/ABC/A/1/2; PP/ABC/A/1/3; PP/ABC/A/1/4

An item record is created to encompass all 4 records: PP/ABC/A/1/1-4

• Either create a new Calm record for the new item, or repurpose the first existing item record to become the new item

• The PublicRef should be a range of the old items it includes

• The old items should now be treated as piece-level records. Move the data into the new item record and edit it following the instruction given in Removing piece-level records

• In the ArchivistNotes field, add a statement to explain that the items have been recatalogued due to being packaged together.

If the items to be recatalogued comprise an entire series, rather than creating a new item record you can turn the series record into an item

For example, PP/ABC/A/1 (series record) comprises 4 items: PP/ABC/A/1/1; PP/ABC/A/1/2; PP/ABC/A/1/3; PP/ABC/A/1/4. Rather than creating a series with a single item, turn PP/ABC/A/1 into the item