the Archon archival information system

I attended a session earlier this month on Archon at the Society of American Archivists conference in Washington. UIUC's Chris Prom and Scott Schwartz presented on the package, which they described as an easy to install, powerful, and intuitive solution to making archival information available online.

After the session, I downloaded the Archon 1.00 software and installed and configured it on my laptop, which is running Windows XP Home. This proved to be a good environment for this test, because I had to install and configure all required packages from scratch: Apache [2.2.3]; PHP [5.1.4]; MySQL [5.0.24]; and, phpMyAdmin [2.6.4-pl4]. (The phpMyAdmin package isn't strictly required, but is useful during the Archon configuration process.) While Prom and Schwartz noted the Archon design goal of providing a solution that insulated users from the technical details, the installation and configuration of the packages needed by Archon isn't a trivial matter. Archon itself has a Windows installer and I found the installation fairly straightforward.

The Archon documentation is informative and should be consulted for more insights into the software.

I've found the Archon administration and user modules pretty straightforward to use. Archon supports the generation of system records from existing EAD and MARC records. This capability, plus the solid search and presentation systems, demonstrate Archon's potential value. In my testing, the software did not successfully import and make searchable a 550 KB EAD XML file. I haven't had a chance to analyze this failure closely, but it's a notable problem. The database that Schwartz searched during the SAA session had 5,701 collection records and the response time appeared to be good.

The software is also architected to support linkages between EAD and MARC metadata records and digital objects. These could be either internal or external objects. In this sense, Archon is a forward-looking archival solution.

Archon users should carefully review the license terms. Although the software is open source, there are significant limitations on usage. Prom talked about some Archon sustainability issues, with one possibility being that UIUC would help support its work through writing scripts for archival sites interested in importing data into their local Archon system.

I investigated Archon as a sustainability option for the NWDA. While it's literally incapable of supporting storage/search/retrieval of the largest NWDA documents, Archon is an interesting approach in several ways, including its open source foundation (AMP) and its ability to import existing archival documents into a powerful system.