Administrative interface

Terms showing in bold are referenced in the glossary.

The admin interface is an optional feature of Pocket Archive aimed at helping less technically oriented archivists work on small, quick changes. It is currently in a primitive state, with some very essential tools, but it can be expanded as needed over time.

[WIP note: all dates and times are currently shown in their formal ISO format, e.g., 2025-10-22T15:05:42Z. This may be hard to read at first, and it will change to a more user-friendly format in the future. The format reads: year - month - day of the month, "T", hour (24h) : minute : second, "Z" (for Greenwich time).]

Usage

You should confirm with your system administrator that the admin interface is set up and running.

Homepage

The admin homepage contains shortcut to various sections. There is a link to the full list of submissions, and an input field to look up a single resource to edit.

Submissions

This page contains a list of all submissions sent to the archive so far. It is possible to display the details page and to download the laundry list for each submission.

The detail page is accessed by the link displaying the submission ID.

The laundry list can be downloaded by clicking on the down arrow icon next to each submission.

The laundry list downloaded from the archive will likely look quite different from the one originally submitted. This is because Pocket Archive creates "implicit" resources in order to keep the laundry list creation process simple. These resources can be ignored if not needed, but they may be useful to the experienced user to track down the details of a structure.

This laundry list can be downloaded for metadata updates of resources in the archive. [WIP note: a full SIP download including files is in the plans]

Submission details

The submission details page shows some information about the submission (ID, name if provided, and date & time of creation. It also displays a list of all resources included in the submission, with some basic metadata for easier identification and a link to the edit page (see below).

Resource editor

The submission process via spreadsheets, while quite efficient for creating or updating multiple resources at a time, can become tedious when resources must be looked up and updated individually. For that, the admin interface provides an edit page where a single resource can be displayed with all its metadata fields, and updated in place without the need to deal with a laundry list.

The resource can be looked up from the homepage by its UID. The admin interface does not provide a search facility, so if the UID is not known, the resource can be searched for in the presentation.

The edit page is very simple and presents all the metadata fields that can be filled in according to the content type. Remember that, once the content type is set on creation, it cannot be changed.

Every field can have multiple values added, or also all values removed. Note that no validation is made at this point, so one could submit an invalid resource. However, validation is done after submitting the changes, and the submission will fail if the validation fails. [WIP note: in-page validation may be added at a later time, but it is not yet planned.]

After the update is submitted, a page is displayed with a report indicating success, failure, or warnings, as well as other technical information such as the submission time, resource UID, etc. If a failure occurred, an error message is displayed, so that the user can correct it if it is a validation error, or report it to the system admin if it is not a content-related error. [WIP note: the report is currently raw data and not too easy to read. Readability improvements shall be made at a later (so far unplanned) time.]