Setting Up Storage Locations
Track where your physical material is stored. Assign locations to individual items, whole accessions, or entire fonds. Navigate to Locations in the sidebar.
Storage locations are on every plan. Creating, editing and deleting them is a workspace admin's job; everyone else can see where things are. Movement tracking — checking things out and back in — needs Starter or above.
Why track locations?
Physical storage locations let you:
- Find material quickly — filter accessions or items by building, room, or shelf reference
- Generate a shelf list — print a black-and-white reference/name/type list for any location, straight from the browser
- See what's stored where, and what's currently out — combined with movement tracking on Starter and above
- Export location data — locations appear in EAD3, CSV, and BagIt exports
Creating a location
- Navigate to Locations in the sidebar.
- Click + Add location.
- Fill in:
- Building (required) — the site, strongroom, or building where the material lives, e.g. "Strongroom A", "Main store", "Off-site store"
- Reference / Shelfmark — your own free-text identifier for the spot, e.g. "Bay 12, Shelf 3" or "Range R5"
- Notes — access restrictions, environment, anything that helps staff find it
- Optionally expand Add more detail to specify:
- Floor, Room, Area (free text)
- Coordinates — up to three labelled levels (e.g. Range / Shelf / Position, or Bay / Shelf / Box) for archives with a formal, structured storage scheme
- Barcode — for scan-to-find and barcode-scanning workflows
- Click Save location.
Building is the only required field — everything else is optional. The location appears in the list immediately, grouped by building, and is now assignable to accessions, items, and fonds.
Finding a location
The Locations list is searchable across building, floor, room, area, coordinates, barcode, and notes. If you use a barcode scanner (a keyboard-wedge type that types the code then presses Enter), scanning a code in the search box jumps straight to the matching location.
Click a location to open its detail page: everything directly assigned there (accessions, individual item overrides, and fonds), plus a Print shelf list button and, where movement tracking is included, an Out from here section for anything whose home is that location but is currently away.
Assigning locations
To an accession, item, or fond
Open the record — accession, item, or fonds node — and find the Storage location panel. Click Change, pick a location, add an optional reason, and save.
To take something off a shelf of its own, use the link under the picker. It is worded from where the thing will actually land — Put it back with its accession — Store A · Bay 3, or Use the workspace's usual place — … — so you know before you press it, and the confirmation reads the result back. Where the record has a shelf of its own the app can't see behind it, so it says only what it removes: Take it off its own shelf.
Item- and fonds-level locations, when set, take precedence over what they'd otherwise inherit from their accession or parent fonds. The panel always shows whether a location is directly assigned or inherited, and names where it was inherited from (e.g. "inherited from accession 2026/041").
Bulk assignment
From the Accessions list:
- Select multiple accessions (card view Select mode or table view checkboxes).
- Click Assign location in the action bar.
- Choose a location, and say why they are moving if it's worth recording.
- Before you confirm, a line under the picker says what the move would actually do — how many would move, how many are already there, how many had no shelf of their own. Click Assign to [building].
All selected accessions receive the same location assignment. Anything filed inside one of them that has a shelf of its own stays where it is.
The same dialog is reached from a location's own page and from the catalogue, so a set of collections or records can be moved in one action too. Take these off their own shelf is the other button: nothing is left nowhere — each one then uses whatever it inherits.
Default location
Set a default location so newly created accessions inherit it automatically:
- On the Locations page, find the location you want.
- Click Set as default.
New accessions will be pre-assigned to this location. Useful for single-site archives where most material lands in the same building. A location marked default can't be deleted until you unset it.
Editing and deleting locations
From the Locations page:
- Click Edit to change a location's details.
- Click Delete to remove it. A location can only be deleted once nothing is linked to it — no accessions, items, or fonds — and it isn't the organisation's default. If something is still linked, the error message names exactly what.
Location data in exports
Locations appear in:
- EAD3 XML — as physical location elements
- CSV exports — a location column showing the full building + reference
- BagIt — in the item-level metadata
- PDF reports — in the item details table
- Location register (CSV) — a dedicated export, one row per location with its accession, file, and fonds counts, available from the Download register (CSV) button on the Locations page
Bringing a list of shelves in
If your locations already exist in a spreadsheet — a shelf list, or a CALM locations export — Bring a list in on the Locations page opens the import wizard pointed at locations. It's a workspace admin's action.
The register you downloaded can go back the same way, which is the quickest route to correcting many locations at once. Two things the page tells you where you download the file, and they matter:
- Keep the first column as it is. It's how your changes are matched back to the right shelves. Leave it empty on a row and that shelf is created as a new one.
- Five of the columns are for reading only — the whole place written out, the three counts, and the one saying which shelf is the workspace's usual place. Changing them does nothing.