Administrative Sets – draft answers from Cincinnati (Linda) to Julie's questions

Who can create an admin set?

I was thinking of this is a top system administrator/ repository manager task, originating top down, not bottom up. A repository manager (which isn’t necessarily a single person) defines what constitutes the admin set (a collection or group of collections or a manual list of works?), and designates someone to manage/own the admin set. The admin set owner can in turn designate roles, such as submitter, metadata editor, and (when we have mediated submission review) reviewers.

But I also think that the distinctions between Admin sets and collections are worth reviewing, and that we need to think about whether any default admin rights are assigned to collections. We have some functionality already, worth detailing – I think this is how Curate currently behaves: (And it seems consistent to me with the concept of collections being analogous to 'favorites'.)

If I as a submitter I create a collection, another submitter cannot add their submissions to my collection.

As a submitter I can however, add another submitter's submissions to my collection (as well as my own submissions), and I can add their collections to my collections.

Can a general user specify a admin set to deposit into? Are they restricted on which they can use?

I would say No, they can not specify an admin set to deposit into, as that would seem to take away the meaning of admin sets. But perhaps there should be a mechanism for requesting this from the admin set owner?

Can a user choose "no admin set"?

I would say yes, that you should be able to submit items that are not members of an admin set (or a collection), or at least I'm not sure what the downside is.

If a particular admin set is chosen, who approves it? What does the approval process look like? Is there more than one approver?

Again, I would say that a submitter who hasn't been assigned rights as an admin set owner or by an admin set owner, should not be able to choose to deposit to any admin set, but only the admin sets to which they have been assigned the right to submit. I think this would be one of the core things you might want an Admin Set to define? Assigning these rights would be the role of the administrator of the admin set?

Should Curate be able to work without using admin sets at all?

It will be hard to do mediated submission without some administrative roles defined for a set of materials. But I can envision an implementation of Curate where an institution chooses to ignore most of these roles.

What roles need to exist for use in admin sets?

How granular should those role/permissions be?

I would start with the roles we put in the working document:

1) Admin set owner/manager -- can assign other roles

2) submitter requiring mediated review

3) submitter not requiring mediated review

4) reviewer -- approves others submissions

5) metadata editor (metadata only -- this role would not imply the ability to delete works or add files to works)

6) works editor (can add files to works, delete works)

Can admin sets hold other admin sets? Is there a hierarchy of collections?

I think yes and yes. I can envision cases where an admin set is a member of a larger admin set; there would be distinct role assignments for the smaller set, and also global role assignments across the larger set. I think the admin set administrator could have the right to define sub-admin sets.

Do we need administrative units?

I think we can separate the concept of organizations and administrative units from administrative sets. I think of an administrative set relating to a set of content, which may or may not relate to an organizational structure. But, I can see us needing to have profiles for organizations. Perhaps when using certain credentials, which still identify an individual for accountability purposes, the organization name associated with that individual would appear in the contributor field. So an archivist working on a particular archival project logs on with their personal credentials, and that fact is logged, but there is a mechanism to indicate that the Archival unit name, rather than their personal name, appears in the profile associated with the work. Those credentials would probably also be associated with an administrative set, but perhaps would not have to be.

Can an item belong to more than one admin set?

A record or work can belong, already, to more than one collection. Admin sets may be defined by a collection or groups of collections. So this would imply that a work could belong to more than one admin set. This of course could be confusing, if we are assigning roles such as who can edit metadata and delete works. If you have the right to delete a work in one admin set and not the other – you should not be able to delete the work, although you could remove it from the admin sets (and collections) to which you have rights? May imply some sort of mediated review and notification system?

If I have submitter rights to a specific admin collection, do I retain rights over that item - say to add it to another admin set?

Yes, if you have rights to the other admin set as well?

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