Adding new collections to Credo is a multiple step process and each step is necessary to ensure that the collection is properly represented in Credo's collection hierarchy and that our collections play well with Digital Commonwealth and the DPLA.

For an individual item in Credo to be part of a collection, it needs to have a MODS <relatedItem> element pointing to that collection. You can find more information about <relatedItem> use in SCUA's Best Practices for MODS. Here's an example:

<mods:relatedItem type="host">
  <mods:titleInfo>
     <mods:title>W. E. B. Du Bois Papers</mods:title>
  </mods:titleInfo>
  <mods:typeOfResource>mixed material</mods:typeOfResource>
  <mods:identifier type="local">MS 312</mods:identifier>
  <mods:identifier type="uri">mums312</mods:identifier>
</mods:relatedItem>

The three requirements for the item to be properly attached to its collection are 1) the @type=“host” in <mods:relatedItem>, 2) the unique ID for the collection in <mods:identifier type=“uri”>, and 3) the title of the collection in <mods:title>. The title must be consistent across all records.

A collection-level record in Credo creates a page like this for each collection, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/collection/mums312. The collection page is generated from an EAD/XML finding aid, placed at the top-level of a directory on oubliette. The name of the file must have the following structure:

collection_[collID].xml

For example, collection_mums312.xml in the mums312 directory in oubliette will be used to generate the HTML for the mums312 collection page. In most cases, all you need to do is copy the collection's existing EAD finding aid and rename accordingly. To link to the full finding aid, add <otherfindaid><extref href=“[collID]”>[Coll name]</extref></otherfindaid> to <archdesc>.

Do not add a collection-level record to the ingest folder. Ingesting these records will wreak unfortunate havoc on Credo. It's enough to simply name the file correctly and add it to the collection top-level folder. It might take some time for a new collection record to appear but it should show up after an ingest (but again, these files don't need to be ingested!)

If you want to add a collection page for a collection that does not yet have a full finding aid, it's easy enough to create a stub EAD record using the information in UMarmot. For a good example of a stub collection-level record, look at collection_mums700.xml on oubliette.

The collection map file helps sort collections in Credo's browse view. You can find the file in the ingest folder named, collmap.txt. Each line of the file contains the display name of the collection followed by the name you want the collection to sort on in the browse view. Typically, this is the authorized form of the collection's primary provenance. Each name is wrapped in double quotes (“) and delimited by a colon (:), e.g.

“W. E. B. Du Bois Papers”:“Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963”

The line above will sort the collection under “D” for Du Bois but display the collection title, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. Changes to this file usually take effect after ingest.