Access to Memory (AtoM) » AtoM Wishlist

Recent testing has discovered that culture fallback is not a part of metadata exports. This means, for example, that French data created in a default-English site can not be exported: all that will come out are controlled fields (such as terms) that have source English terms. All free-text fields will be blank, unless English translations have been added. This makes it impossible for some i18n data to be exported in a multilingual site.

This feature request would add an export language option to the configuration settings for clipboard exports. Options to consider including:

1. Export data in all languages (default)
2. Select language of export data

The above could be implemented as a radio button selection, with all languages being the default. For option 1 (all languages), each version of the data (for example, FR source data, EN translation, ES translation) would be exported in its own row in the CSV. legacyID values would be the same, but culture values would be different. If this were imported into another AtoM instance, it should come in as a single description with multiple translations.

For DC XML, the default export could include all languages. DC XML supports repeating elements and language attributes. For DC XML, see the qualified example included in section 5.3 of this page:

• https://www.dublincore.org/specifications/dublin-core/dc-xml-guidelines/

  <dc:description>
    UKOLN is a national focus of expertise in digital information
    management. It provides policy, research and awareness services
    to the UK library, information and cultural heritage communities.
    UKOLN is based at the University of Bath.
  </dc:description>
  <dc:description xml:lang="fr">
    UKOLN est un centre national d'expertise dans la gestion de l'information
    digitale.
  </dc:description>

This would require significant changes to the current implementation, but would vastly improve AtoM's multilingual support in import and export.

With EAD 2002, the answer is less clear - I have found no multilingual examples, and most elements do not support individual language attributes. The best approach would likely be to export multiple separate EAD 2002 XML files where multilingual content is available.

If option 2 is selected then a language selection menu would appear, populated by Symfony's language options. The easiest approach would be to allow users to only select one language at a time from this dropdown, though it may also be possible to allow for multi-selects.