archivemati.ca

I started Archivemati.ca the blog in 2005. After an enthusiastic first couple of years, I only maintain this site now to keep links to previous articles active which, apparently, are still requested relatively frequently.

If you are looking for Archivematica the software project, please see http://archivematica.org

ICA-AtoM is now on release 1.0.4 and is currently being presented at the ICA booth at the DLM Forum in Toulouse, France.

As an archivist and electronic records consultant, I have spent a lot of time over the past 10 years trying to explain to IT managers why we are trying to apply records retention schedules to their entire IT infrastructure. Over the past few years this message is getting through. I only wish I had this video to show 10 years ago. 

I am writing this post on the plane back home to Vancouver right now after a hectic and exciting week at the ICA Congress in Kuala Lumpur where we officially launched the 1.0 beta version of the ICA-AtoM software. The response has been overwhelmingly positive. We had great attendance at our launch presentation, user workshops, adminstrator workshop and steering committee meeting. I was asked to give a briefing on the project last night to the ICA Executive Board and I was interviewed about the project by the ICA Flying Reporters, who did an excellent job covering all the happenings of the ICA Congress. Here is a link to the interview.

We distributed over 1300 copies of the ICA-AtoM beta 1.0 Demo CD. These are customized Ubuntu Linux LiveCDs that are running Apache web server, MySQL database server, Mozilla Firefox and the ICA-AtoM application. The CDs load the Linux operating system and application stack into the memory of any type of computer. This makes it easy to demo our web application on a local machine. This picture shows our Demo CDs bypassing Windows in the computer lab to prepare for the ICA-AtoM user workshop.

We now have over 30 archival institutions worldwide signed up to join the formal round of beta testing which will take place between October 2008 and March 2009. We also have volunteers to translate the application into another five languages. We are in discussion to test deployment with several institutions and it appears likely that we have sponsors for some focused development work on the application core which will help to move it forward from an early beta version to a stable production-ready release.

If you weren’t able to attend the ICA Congress you can download and burn your own copy of the Demo CD or simply try out the online demo version of ICA-AtoM available at http://ica-atom.org/demo/. Of course, if you have your own web server or web hosting account you can download and install your own copy of ICA-AtoM.

Please keep in mind, however, that this is an early 1.0 beta version. It is undergoing active development and testing. We’d love to get your feedback on the user discussion list to report any bugs and to help us improve the software to meet your requirements.

I am in Goiânia, Brazil right now, attending the Association of Brazilian Archivists conference. Yesterday, I delivered a 3 hour presentation on the ICA-AtoM Project and Open Source Software for Archives. They seem to like long presentations with lively debate running into over-time here in Brazil. Fortunately, there was a translation service available, although the animated debates sounded much more interesting in their native Portugese. I have posted my presentation slides here

I did the entire software demonstration and presentation using the Ubuntu Linux LiveCD which we have customized to load a demo version of ICA-AtoM. We are currently duplicating these CDs for distribution to all the registrants at the ICA Congress in Kuala Lumpur where we are officially launching the Beta 1.0 release of the software. The LiveCD includes a free copy of the OpenOffice.org suite which I used for my presentation slideshow. You are free to burn your own copy of the DemoCD which is available for download here.

The Brazilian Archivists are very interested in the ICA-AtoM. This is due in large part to the fact that the entire Brazilian public sector is rapidly switching over to open-source solutions. Since ICA-AtoM is translated into Portugese, it now gives Brazilian archival institutions an opportunity to join in this movement.

Therefore, I was very pleased to meet Director Maria Tereza de Britto Matos and Ricardo Sodré Andrade from the Bahia State Archives this week. Ricardo has been doing the Portugese translations for the ICA-AtoM project. He will be installing ICA-AtoM at the Bahia State Archives shortly so that they can begin beta testing the software.

Next week I’ll be in Fredericton, New Brunswick for the Association of Canadian Archivists conference. I’ll be doing a session on Open Source Software for Archives as well as make a presentation to the Council of Provincial and Territorial Archivists about the BCAUL ICA-AtoM Pilot Project.

However, I am most excited about the ArchivesGeekFest which I helped to organize. I am happy to be proven wrong but I suspect that this may be the first ever BarCamp for archivists, or maybe the second if you count the Best Practices Exchange Conference (which seems like a great unconventional conference for information professionals that I’ve been tempted to attend but always too busy to schedule).

I was inspired to propose and organize ArchivesGeekFest after attending several BarCamp style events here in Vancouver, which has a great tech community, as well as the Access conference Hackfest in Victoria this past fall.

We’ve only got 16 registrants but my hope is that we’ll have enough fun and share enough ideas with this small group to inspire this to become a regular feature of the ACA conference (i.e. the ‘unconference before the conference’). In the end, BarCamps are about participation so its going to be up to all 16 of us to make something of it. If it doesn’t fly at least I’ve tried and I’ll always have the next Vancouver DemoCamp to look forward to.

It was a little over two years ago now that Peter Horsman of the Dutch Archiefschool and I toyed around with the idea of trying to get an open-source archival description software project off the ground. We found a willing partner in the ICA and off we went. It’s been a race to the ICA Congress in Kuala Lumpur ever since. We will launch our first beta 1.0 release there in July. When we drafted our initial project plan I had hoped to have a more polished, mature application ready for the ICA Congress but we have come reasonably far given the short time span, limited resources and very ambitious design which we are working with. Earlier this month we reached another important milestone when we held the first meeting of the ICA-AtoM Steering Committee in Amsterdam. Besides good software, documentation and an active user community, the other critical success factor for any open-source project is to clearly establish its purpose, licensing and governance structure. This is namely to assure potential users that thought and planning has gone into the long-term sustainability of the software. After the Steering Committee meeting in Amsterdam I think the ICA-AtoM project is well on its way to accomplishing this. See my discussion list post for more information about the ICA-AtoM mission statement and governance structure.

I was in Victoria, BC yesterday to give a demonstration and presentation on the ICA-AtoM software project at the Archives Association of British Columbia (AABC) conference. It was also the first opportunity to announce the BCAUL pilot project that Artefactual Systems will carry out in partnership with the AABC, Library and Archives of Canada, Simon Fraser University Archives and University of Victoria Archives. The software and migration project were well received. Archivists are excited about the prospect of an open-source alternative to manage their descriptions and put their collections online.

The BCAUL pilot project will implement an ISAD-to-RAD crosswalk, test migration of data from the current BCAUL database, remote data-entry directly into the BCAUL database via the ICA-AtoM web forms (UVic Archives), EAD XML import of archival descriptions from an alternate system into the BCAUL database (SFU Archives), and development of an archival description harvesting features (sponsored by the Library and Archives of Canada).

If everything goes well during the pilot phase, we will make a full migration of the BCAUL data into an ICA-AtoM hosted system. Other key components of the project include an assessment of the technical readiness of British Columbia archival institutions to use one of the three options to contribute their archival descriptions to the new BCAUL and the preparation of training material and support services (via the AABC’s existing Advisory Service). Of course, the upgraded network will have to work with whatever tools individual institutions choose to manage their archival descriptions but for those that currently don’t have archival description software or are having trouble getting their existing descriptions online they can implement the free and open-source ICA-AtoM software.

In the meanwhile, development of the ICA-AtoM software continues at a blistering pace. I demonstrated the 0.6 development version at the conference yesterday. We would have liked to package this version into a release a few months ago already but we’re slowed down by the data model refactoring that is necessary to implement a fully internationalized application as well as actually translating the user interfaces and default content (from English into French, Spanish, Portugese, and Dutch). Nevertheless, additional development of new features such as XML import/export and the application installer continues in parallel to the internationalization work.

The official launch of the 1.0 beta will take place at the ICA Congress in Kuala Lumpur in late July. This will ship with an installer and a demo environment. However, if you are a developer or techie familiar with the Subversion source code versioning system and setting up a LAMP environment then you are welcome to checkout the software from the online repository at any time.

Archivematica was hacked by some spammers a couple of weeks ago which was made possible by the fact that I was running an ancient, insecure version of Wordpress. I put up a ’sorry, site not available’ page since I did not have the time to migrate to a later version of Wordpress. I was actually considering it an opportunity to quietly back-out of my blogging presence as I have hit the blogging wall several times over the past year.

Well, to my pleasant surprise, I started receiving emails almost immediately from people wanting archived copies of old posts. In particular my presentation screencasts. Several requests were of the panicky variety as people were using them for classroom instruction and had assigned them as readings or were about to go into a meeting where they planned to refer to them. Who knew!?

To say the least, I was flattered and decided it was worth the effort to re-instate the blog. Of course, it would also be sadly ironic if I were to let a blog about digital archives disappear, save the cached copies over at Google and the Internet Archive.

So here is Archivematica 2.0 with a fresh theme and another cautious promise to actually fill it with content now and then. For anyone that was concerned about accessing old posts and contents, everything should be available via any of the old or temporary links that I’ve assigned over the years. Now I’m off to review my blog backup process…

A little over two years ago I was brainstorming an online digital archiving service that would help individuals take control of their scattered online identities and digital media by centralizing them in a personal digital archives system that was built using professional archives standards and emerging digital preservation technologies. I put together a little business plan slide presentation and was going to call it ‘archivematica’.

Well, the project fell by the wayside, as per usual, when I got too busy with paid contract work. However, as you can see from the name and URL of this blog, the domain name still came in handy.

Even if I would have had time to pursue this concept further at the time, I would have run into a number issues with trying to ’scrape’ profiles and content from websites such as Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, etc.. It turns out the new ‘open’ web still has many closed doors.

That’s why I’m very excited to hear about the work of the DataPortability.org group.

They share the same objectives as my ‘archivematica’ concept, namely:

1. “We want sovereignty over the profiles, relationships, content and media we create and maintain.
2. We want open formats, protocols and policies for identity discovery, data import, export and sync.
3. We want to protect user rights and privacy…”

DataPortability.org is not interested in inventing new protocols or standards. Instead they want to create a Technical Interoperability Blueprint to define how existing, simple-to-implement, de-facto protocols and standards (e.g. OpenID, RSS, Microformats, etc.) can be integrated and aligned to make user data portable between multiple online sites and services. Of course, this will require buy-in from the big Web 2.0 sites, so ‘evangelism’ is a major component of the DataPortability.org work.

I am very excited about this initiative. I have joined the discussion groups and will be tracking progress with interest. Hopefully I’ll have an opportunity in the near future to implement the DataPortability.org reference designs in the tools that I am now working on.