Skip to main content

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.

Locations are available on Professional plans and 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 Professional+ plans
  • Export location data — locations appear in EAD3, CSV, and BagIt exports

Creating a location​

  1. Navigate to Locations in the sidebar.
  2. Click + Add location.
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. 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, on paid tiers, whatever is currently checked out from that location.

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 (or choose Use inherited location to clear an item- or fonds-level override and fall back to the parent's location), add an optional reason, and save.

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:

  1. Select multiple accessions (card view Select mode or table view checkboxes).
  2. Click Assign location in the action bar.
  3. Choose a location.
  4. Confirm.

All selected accessions receive the same location assignment.

Default location​

Set a default location so newly created accessions inherit it automatically:

  1. On the Locations page, find the location you want.
  2. 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

See also​