So we have an additional Item Type Element called “Additional Item info.” I created it a few months ago and everything seemed to be working fine. Today, a research assistant noticed that if you click to edit the item and change “Item Type Metadata - Text” and make a change, the “Item Type Metadata- Additional Item Info” disappears from the show.php/display page. However, if you click to edit the item again, go back to Item Type Metadata and choose additional item info from the dropdown, then click save, the additional item info re-appears on the display page. So the steps are:
Choose to edit an item with two distinct Item Type Metadata options, in this case ITM-Text and one we created.
Make a change to ITM-Text and choose Save.
Notice on the display page that the other ITM doesn’t show up.
Choose to edit the item again and this time, from the ITM dropdown, choose the other ITM (don’t make any changes to it).
Save and refresh the display page, suddenly both ITM show up again.
So you’re talking about two distinct types, or two fields within a type? I thought you were talking about two fields, but the “dropdown” instruction sounds like changing to a different type.
An item can only have one type, so whichever one you’ve last selected will be what shows on the page. A type can have multiple fields, though. Omeka is somewhat “lazy” here and will actually keep around the fields that don’t apply to your current type, and they’ll reappear if you switch types back.
OK, so I think I then misunderstood in a previous post what the correct approach would be to this. I should create an entirely new type for all of my items, and then add a field of “additional info” to that? Is this the best approach? We have nearly 4,000 items at this point but probably only about 50-60 have the additional info at this point.
The important limitation here is that an item can only have one Item Type (or none).
So, whatever you’re doing with Item Type metadata, each item needs to be assigned a type that contains all the necessary fields. This doesn’t need to be a new type necessarily, as you can freely add fields to existing types.
If you’re using several different types (for different items), you could add your custom field to each of them.