UNC-Libraries/Curators-Workbench — Issue #74: Create work flow for capturing multiple removable drives in one project.
Author: gregjan
Created: 2011-10-10 18:57:32+00:00
State: open

The workbench does not support this work flow currently. The Original folder link to a CD or removable drive is generally to the drive root path, which on windows does not distinguish between two different disks. On Mac and Linux, two disc with the same volume label will have the same path. This is also frequent, since many programs set volume labels to the current date or similar non-unique values. So path collision is a real problem.

If you remove a disc after linking to it, then refresh, you will see the contents vanish and a warning label.

However, if you attempt to mount and link to a different disc with the same path, this won't work due to the Eclipse resource name conflict. If we allow the user to supply a unique name for the new disc, then we will probably be able to create the separate original object (link). (But now we have two originals pointing to the same path. If we refresh the first, it will show the contents of the second.)

One approach to this might be to allow the user to manually "close" or "eject" originals that are removable. We could then mark that original link as offline somehow. It would not be available for capture until is was reopened..

The key here is probably that the same drive path cannot be used simultaneously for two different discs. Java can tell me if a certain path is a drive.

Food for thought. In any case, this workflow is in demand. For instance, you might often have a collection that consists of just a few CDs. These might easily fit into one manifest or submission in an ordinary workflow. For now the workaround is to accession these CDs to separate projects at different times.