open source software solutions for collection management and web delivery

This should be one of the most interesting sessions at the meeting. The two basic tasks described in the session title (collection management and web delivery) have open source or freely-available software solutions that have been released in the past year to 18 months (the Archivists Toolkit and Archon, respectively). The session summary also mentions non open source software solutions, such as CONTENTdm.

Susan Hamburger of Penn State described Penn State’s exploration of CONTENTdm as an archival document management and delivery tool. The selection process that Penn State went through is described online and is very useful. However, the five selected options don’t seem complete. Additionally, the Archivists Toolkit, primarily an archival processing tool, was included in Penn State’s evaluation, which means that only four online delivery solutions were considered.

Jennifer Harp of Mount St. Mary’s described her institution’s work with a DSpace IR. She views the IR as a natural archival task, based upon its long-term storage, preservation, and access functions. Each of the two SAA meetings that I’ve attended has had a DSpace presentation; last year in Washington, Mackenzie Smith presented on MIT’s work development and creation of the software. She described the preservation support in the software, including bit preservation and the requirement to declare a preservation level for a submitted file, and the value of search engine support for document access.

Lisa Miller of the Hoover Institution described her institution’s work with a MySQL and PHP. She described the work that she and her colleagues performed in developing and applying a WAMP solution to support archival information (not EAD) searching. On the positive side, the end user and submission applications appear attractive and functional. On the negative side, she noted that her institution had encountered security problems with the PHP/MySQL solution that actually led to significant down time (in months) from public access.

Only one of these three presentations dealt with the EAD management and searching issue, and in Penn State’s case, the institution appears to be leaning towards employing CONTENTdm without fully committing to it. I thought about this 1 in 3 ratio during the later CONTENTdm noontime session, when Geri Ingram of OCLC focused on CONTENTdm's support for archival digitization and access in broad terms, with EAD being discussed far less than at the CONTENTdm session held at last year's SAA in Washington.