Introducing automatically incrementing identifiers, an extremely efficient new way to apply custom IDs to your metadata items!
What are automatically incrementing identifiers?
Like free-text and manually-assigned identifiers, automatically assigned incrementing identifiers are Namespaces, and a created inside the ‘Managed Items’ tab of a Stewardship Organisation.
Once you’ve adjusted the ‘Name’, ‘Shorthand prefix’ and ‘Definition’ fields as desired, you can now select ‘Automatically assigned incrementing identifier’ from the ‘Identifier Sequence Rule’ dropdown.
When this new option is selected, up to four new lists will appear in the creation tool.
The ‘Metadata types’ list will appear regardless of exterior factors. From here, you can select metadata item type(s) for this Namespace to automatically be applied to whenever an item of that type is created for a workgroup in the chosen Stewardship Organisation!
The ‘Metadata templates’ list will contain any metadata item templates accessible to this Stewardship Organisation, if any. Selecting one from this list will cause the Namespace to be automatically applied to any metadata items made using the selected template(s)!
The ‘Registration authorities’ and ‘Registration statuses’ lists will appear if the Stewardship Organisation contains any Registration Authorities. These allow you to have the Namespace automatically apply to metadata items that are registered with the selected Registration Authority(or Authorities) or as the selected status(es) respectively.
With each instance of this Namespace that’s applied, the associated identifier will contain a number one value higher than the last.
This means that the first time you apply this Namespace to an item, that item will have an identifier of ‘[Your prefix] 1’. The second item you apply the Namespace to will have an identifier of ‘[Your prefix] 2’, the third of ‘[Your prefix] 3’, etc.
Please enjoy the following video demonstrating a simple usage of automatically incrementing identifiers:
How do automatically incrementing identifiers benefit users?
Automatically incrementing identifiers were developed to hasten the process of assigning increasingly large identifiers to metadata items that all require one.
This new functionality saves users from having to manually count, and incrementally assign metadata items an identifier based on those that were assigned an identifier before them, as well as removes any room for error when it comes to the actual value being assigned to each item.
This makes possible the process of individually identifying metadata items on a much larger scale than was convenient before. As many items as necessary can now be automatically assigned a custom ID without any settings beyond the above ever needing to be adjusted!
Your feedback matters
Your feedback is invaluable as we continue to innovate and improve the Aristotle Metadata Registry. We’ve designed this feature with your metadata management needs in mind, and we want to hear from you. Please don’t hesitate to reach out with suggestions, ideas, or questions.