Hi

 

The email below may be of interest to archivists on this list – and perhaps to others also.

 

Dennis

 

 

[This message is being posted to several lists, and we apologize for duplicate receipts.  Please feel free to pass the announcement to interested colleagues.]



Archivists’ Toolkit^TM 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Targets are not created for references in exported EADs.  Thus, internal links in an EAD will not work. 
5. 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
 

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