missing subject records

[saracarl]

CWRGM is one of our biggest users for subject linking. They recently reported:

I recently found an issue with our Secretaries tag at FTP, and I am puzzled by it, so I hoping one of y’all can help. We’ve been tagging Secretaries for a while and currently it is at the Omeka site under the Professional Labor category with an annotation and is tagged in 2,113 documents. However, I recently discovered in FTP that the Secretaries tag is in a new category (Occupations), is missing its annotation, and is only tagged to 60 documents. I cannot even find the original tag anymore in FTP. Do you have any sense of what could have happened to it? I would say that someone on the team accidentally deleted it, but I know you have to remove the links before you can delete a tag, and I highly doubt a team member removed over 2,000 instances of a subject tag.

If we need to just not tag secretaries because the data is lost, that’s fine, but I would like to know what happened if possible so this doesn’t happen again, especially on a tag where we cannot lose that data. Do any of you have any back channel ways of finding our missing tag? Or what happened it it?

and

I found another tag with this issue. The Mississippi-Executive Department at Omeka has over 2,000 tags and an annotation but only 76 docs and no annotation at FTP.

It is possible that they were combined together in FTP, but neither Camp nor I have combined them (maybe someone who should not have been, did?). I would also think, however, that if the tags were merged together they would have 2,173 docs tagged to Secretaries and over 2,000 tagged to the MS Executive Dept. tag.