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In June 2015, The Chicago Academy of Sciences / Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum formally decided to use Arctos as its collection management system. In addition to being a robust database fully capable of handling all collections management needs, Arctos is also entirely hosted in the cloud, and collections data can easily be made accessible online to the research community and the public.

This repository and wiki document workflows and lessons learned during our ongoing process of migrating collections inventory data from Excel to Arctos. For the current status of CHAS data migration, please see the spreadsheet InventorySpreadsheets_MasterList.xlxs located on the Collections server in the Inventory directory.

All inventory directories on the Collections server that have begun the migration process have a README.txt file that notes the status of the discipline and its associated data.

README.txt for inventory discipline folders where the discipline is not entirely migrated:

As of [date] [discipline] data is in the process of being migrated to Arctos (arctos.database.museum). Once the data is fully uploaded to Arctos it must be accessed and updated there. This Read Me will be updated at that point. DO NOT USE OLD SPREADSHEETS FOR NEW DATA.

The following spreadsheets have been migrated to Arctos: [spreadsheet names]

The following spreadsheets are being worked on in Open Refine: [spreadsheet names]

README.txt for inventory discipline folders where the discipline is entirely migrated:

All [discipline] specimen data is available on Arctos (arctos.database.museum).

Inventory directories often include a subdirectory for Archived Inventory Data within which there are two documents (Arctos_DataCrosswalk_[Discipline].pdf and Arctos_DataDictionary_[Discipline].pdf) that can help you understand how data from the archived inventory spreadsheets was migrated into the Arctos database.

README.txt for Archived Inventory Data folders where the discipline is not entirely migrated:

Data in this folder is maintained as an archive and is not currently maintained. Current data can either be found in the main discipline folder or on Arctos (arctos.database.museum).

README.txt for Archived Inventory Data folders where the discipline is entirely migrated:

As of [date] all [discipline] data is migrated to Arctos (arctos.database.museum) and must be accessed and updated there. DO NOT USE OLD SPREADSHEETS FOR NEW DATA.