archivemati.ca

On the plane ride to and from the ACA 2006 conference in St.John’s, Newfoundland I finally got a chance to read Peter Morville’s much lauded book Ambient Findability (O’Reilly, 2005).
In this book, Morville studies the latest Web trends and technologies from the perspective of findability, which he defines as the “the degree to which a [...]

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I am very pleased to announce that the consulting project I will be working on over the summer is the design and development of an open source archival description application. The codename for the project and software is ICA-AtoM, which is an acronymn for International Council on Archives – Access to Memory.
The International Council [...]

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I have been blogging and presenting about how Web 2.0 features might influence archives access systems. In the meanwhile, Professor Beth Yakel and a group of grad students at the University of Michigan’s School of Information have already launched an excellent prototype system to experiment with these concepts.
The Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections website [...]

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I’ve been preparing my presentation for some upcoming conferences in Summer 2006 (IS&T Archiving, Association of Canadian Archivists, Society of American Archivists). I’m going to be talking about Web 2.0 as a set of enabling technologies and practices that can enhance the quality of archives access systems.
Of course, “Web 2.0″ is a hodge-podge of intersecting [...]

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Wow. I just watched an excellent webcast presentation by Rick Prelinger of the Prelinger Film Archives and one of the people behind the Open Content Alliance.
The ominous title of the presentation “Are the Archives Doomed?” is in reference to the growing restrictions on access to archival materials that are due to copyright issues, restrictive archival [...]

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The BBC has the largest broadcast media archives in the world and the BBC Archives is certainly one of the more progressive institutions when it comes to using and providing access to its archival materials. Foremost in these efforts is the much publicized plan to open the contents of their archives for non-commerical re-use (under [...]

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The diagram below is a rough (incomplete) attempt to illustrate how the System Requirements for Archives Access Systems might manifest themselves in a logical architecture for an archives access system that is focused on providing access via a website.

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In order to study existing Archives Access Systems and to develop prototypes that incorporate Web 2.0 features, I will need to develop a core set of generic system requirements that describes what an Archives Access System must be able to do.

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Archival institutions use archives access systems to provide users with information about a collection of archival materials and allow them to browse, search and retrieve specific items within the collection.
My research is focused on online access systems that use web-based technologies to provide access to digital or digitized archives. I am using the term ‘archives [...]

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