Special Collections XSLT

XSLT stylesheets for transforming Archivists Toolkit exports to HTML for Bowdoin Special Collections website.

The ead2html.xsl is the key file in this project. It is used with the xsltproc, an XSLT v1.0 transformation program, to convert .xml files exported from Archivists Toolkit (AT) into HTML pages for use on Bowdoin Special Collections website. Samples of AT exports are in the samples directory and used for testing.

Sample use:

xsltproc ead2html.xsl samples/multiple-dao.xml > multiple-dao.html

When developing use the development XSL like this to apply the absolute URLs for CSS and JS:

xsltproc ead2html-dev.xsl export/M091-ead.xml > M091-ead.html

Summer 2017 / Winter 2018 Project

Update the XSLT to produce a new HTML that is more appealing.

• Carr's Sample New Version
• samples/M118-ead.xml: export from Archivist's Toolkit.
• samples/macmillian/macmillian2.shtml: the hoped for HTML translation.
• samples/macmillian/macmillian.shtml: the current HTML translation.
• ead2html.xsl: the new translation XSLT
• ead2html-dev.xsl: translation XSLT that wraps ead2html.xsl with local hosted includes rather than server side includes that are used on the production site. Use this to test in development.

Winter 2019 - ArchiveSpace Does not Render Multiple Container objects

Hi Stephen – Would you have time to do a little more troubleshooting on the XSL that transforms the EAD finding aids? We are getting ready to switch from the Archivists Toolkit software to the newer product ArchivesSpace. The EAD XML that AS exports is a little bit different From AT in the namespace it sets and the way it creates IDs in tags. Mostly the existing XSL works, and it doesn’t cause any errors on the new AS eads, but some of the container level information isn’t coming out right. I could show you the problem areas – or send you examples of the files… I’ve tried to step through it but when I get in to all those container level tests I get all turned around. Thanks… Mike

• Sills-AT-EAD.xml is an export from Archivist's Toolkit (old)
• Sills-AS-EAD.xml is an export from Archive Space (new)

The far right column should show something like 'Box 1, Folder 2' for Series 2 but instead shows seemingly the title.

These problems only seem to appear when there are multiple container elements inside a did. Of other note, AS exports a unitid in the did where AT did not.

Examples are at

• Sills-AT-EAD.xml:386
• Sills-AS-EAD.xml:393

Solution / Workaround

It's in the selection of c-files versus c-multi-files templates inside the did. The number of unique id in a did:container use to tell how many items were in a did. That is in AT an item was in a 'box', with an id, and then in a 'folder' which did not have it's own id, but instead a parent with the parent container's id (the box). In AS both the 'box' and the 'folder' have an id, thus the calculation of the number of children containers is now different. The parent id is still in the 'folder' container but it also has it's own unique id. All this means the c-files vs c-multi-files template selection does not work. In the old AT there's only three files that used c-multi-files: M015, M089, and M254. These are all broken when they call c-multi-files. An interim solution is to fix the c-multi-files template to be the same as c-files. This is until the linking of parent to children in the container did can get sorted out. I'm not sure which objects to test with at the moment. I don't know of any that truly have multiple objects in the did.

Also note that 'box' and 'folder' the type used in container objects are not capitalized in Archive Space like they were in Archivist's Toolkit.