Archivists’ ToolkitTM Version 1.0 Available for Download
The University of California, San Diego, New York University, and the
Five Colleges, Inc. are pleased to announce the release of the
Archivists’ Toolkit™ Version 1.0. It is available for download at
http://www.archiviststoolkit.org/.
The Archivists’ Toolkit™ is being offered under an Educational Community
License (ECL).
The AT is the first open source archival data management system to
provide integrated support for accessioning, description, donor tracking,
name and subject authority work, and location management for archival
materials. The effort to build this application has benefited
tremendously from the interested guidance of the archival community and
was made possible through the generous funding from The Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation.
Key Features:
- Integrated support for managing archival materials from acquisition
through processing:
- Recording repository information
- Tracking sources / donors
- Recording accessions
- Basic authority control for names and topical subjects
- Describing archival resources and digital objects
- Managing location information
- Customizable interface:
- Modify field labels
- Establish default values for fields and notes where boilerplate text
is used
- Customize searchable fields and record browse lists
- Ingest of legacy data in multiple formats: EAD 2002, MARC XML, and
tab delimited accession data
- Rapid data entry interface for creating container lists quickly
- Management of user accounts, with a range of permission levels to
control access to data
- Tracking of database records, including username and date of record
creation and most recent edit
- Generation of over 30 different administrative and descriptive
reports, such as acquisition statistics, accession records, shelf lists,
subject guides, etc.
- Export EAD 2002, MARC XML, METS, MODS, and Dublin Core
- Support for desktop or networked, single- or multi-repository
installations
The Archivists’ Toolkit™ Version 1.0 is being released with the following
known issues, which will be addressed quickly:
- The user manual is not completely up to date with the current version
of the software, as testing and development have continued up to the
point of release. Therefore, some chapters will have outdated screen
shots, or no screen shots. The user manual is serviceable, however, and
will be brought completely up to date very soon.
- All exports are valid, but some may be imperfect. For example, MARC
XML output is not in MARC tag sequence order. These minor improvements
will be addressed shortly after release.
- The Archivists’ Toolkit™ currently accepts non-valid EAD, allowing
poorly structured data to be imported into the application. This will not
be possible in subsequent releases. In the meantime, archivists can
mitigate the issue by validating their EADs before importing them into
the Toolkit.
- Targets are not created for references in exported EADs. Thus,
internal links in an EAD will not work.
- The source code has not yet been made available generally. If
you would like the source code, please contact
[log in to unmask]
Archivists’ Toolkit Project Team:
Bradley Westbrook, Project Manager and Lead Analyst (UC, San Diego)
Lee Mandell, Design Team Manager and Lead Programmer (Boston,
Mass.)
Jason Varghese, Programmer (New York University)
Kelcy Shepherd, Archives Analyst (Five Colleges, Inc.)
Brian Stevens, Archives Analyst (New York University)
Judy Dombromski, Interface Design Consultant (Boston, Mass)
Arwen Hutt, Metadata Consultant (UC, San Diego)
Jane Lee, Usability Consultant (California Digital Library)
