open source archival tools: Archon, Archivists' Toolkit

Since SAA 2006, I have been working with open source archival tools. I met the creators of Archon at the meeting and later presented on the software at a fall meeting of the Northwest Digital Archives project directors. I'm now starting to work with the Archivists' Toolkit (AT), which was released in late 2006. In starting this work, I've come across several (1 2) blog posts from the SAA conference comparing/contrasting these two open source solutions.

In a couple of ways, the AT client lives up to its version 1.0 status (examples: AT administrative credentials, both user name and password, are locked down and visible to users at the client; the wrong .NET control is used to display information in a read-only context [Help / About Archivists' Toolkit]). Peter Van Garderan's post provides a good summary of the capabilities of these two packages:

Although there is overlap between the two applications, I would characterize Archon as being more focused on allowing its users to get finding aids online and Archivists’ Toolkit as an application to assist archivists in the internal processing of archival collections.

Both tools are RDBMS-based, using MySQL. As a result, both Archon and AT explode the content of loaded EAD XML to match the table and columnar structure of relational databases. The deteriments of this approach were identified long ago (see this article). I believe that one factor leading archival tool developers to MySQL is the lack of a solid, open source XML database alternative.

Of the two tools, I've worked more deeply with Archon. Conceptually, it works quite well in integrating EAD finding aids and digital objects. However, finding aid content is lost as the document is loaded to the Archon's MySQL database. Additionally, at least with the Archon 1.00 release, MB-sized finding aids with long component lists simply didn't load during testing.