Hi everyone, sorry I was away from my email all day yesterday so I'm coming to 
this discussion late but I thought I'd reply to Alex's original question with 
my own thoughts.

If you have a hierarchical arrangement of Locations such as the following ..

     Main Building
         Room 1
             Shelf A
                 Box 1
         Room 2
             Shelf B

.. and you physically move "Box 1" from it's current location to "Shelf B" in 
"Room 2" then it seems to me that the perfect way to reflect this action in 
MuseumIndex+ is to simply open the Location authority in the Thesaurus Manager 
and drag "Box 1" from its current position to "Shelf B" under "Room 2". At 
that point the location of all the objects that were previously displaying 
"Main Building / Room 1 / Shelf A / Box 1" will automatically change to 
display "Main Building / Room 2 / Shelf B / Box 1".

Essentially you CAN think of the terms in the Location authority as physical 
containers and, where aprpopriate, just move them around within the hierarchy 
to represent moving those containers in the real world.

On 28/11/2012 12:58, Alexandra Gordon-Jones wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I have a location authority hierarchy question for any MI+ users.
>
> We store smaller objects in boxes and then give these boxes numbers, each box
> number being recorded in the location authority hierarchy for a certain shelf
> in a certain store. Our problem arises in that we don’t treat boxes as
> permanent locations, they can and do get moved to other locations - the box is
> just the housing for the object. Our other location authorities, like bays,
> shelves, etc., are permanent storage locations. So creating authority records
> for boxes can lead to problems, especially when the box is relocated - the
> entire location hierarchy has to be permanently altered.**
>
> I just wanted to know how other museum treat boxes in relation to the location
> hierarchy. Do you enter them into the locations authority, or perhaps use the
> location notes field to record box numbers (as we are contemplating)?
>
> Any thoughts or suggestions would be much appreciated.