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.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 use
- 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 Therefore, some chapters will have outdated screen shots, or no screen shots.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 info@archiviststoolkit.
Requesting support: Please send all inquiries, reports, and requests for support concerning the application to the Archivists Toolkit User Group (ATUG-l can be subscribed to at http:// mailman.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/ atug-l) and / or to info@archiviststoolkit.org. Please do not contact project staff directly via their email addresses or telephone numbers. Sending messages to ATUG-l or to info@archiviststoolkit.org will ensure that your question or report is responded to in a more timely manner.
