Introducing Access to Memory

Editor's Notes

• #4 AtoM is short for Access to Memory. It is a web-based, open source application for standards-based archival description and access in a multilingual, multi-repository environment. Now that’s a mouthful, so we’re going to break down each of these elements a bit more in the following slides. ------ Web based: Once installed, you only need a modern web browser and an internet connection to connect to the application from anywhere Standards-based: AtoM implements existing national and international archival content and metadata transmission standards and best practices, so your data is standards compliant and interoperable Multilingual: Supports translations of both content and user interface elements, can be used as a multilingual catalogue Multi-repository: Can be used as a portal site, content aggregator, or union catalogue to provide access to content from multiple institutions
• #5 Web-based: All user interactions with the system (add, view, search, edit, and delete actions) take place through a web browser. Users access HTML pages on the web server; clicking a button or link triggers a PHP script that sends a command to the database and returns the output as HTML back to the user’s browser. Once installed, you can view or edit AtoM descriptions from anywhere, with nothing but a web browser and an internet connection. Platform independent: AtoM was built using open-source tools that can be installed or virtualized on any number of platforms. The team at Artefactual prefers to use Nginx as our web server in both development and production environments, but Apache has been tested and used successfully by our community as well.
• #6 The underlying AtoM code is itself open source, with the source code freely available for use or modification as users or other developers see fit (under the A-GPL version 3 license). The Affero General Public License version 3 makes the source code available for users, enables collaboration between developers of web services and other networked software. Therefore there is no cost to download any of the software required to run the AtoM application – use it with or without Artefactual support. You are also free to study the code, modify it, distribute your modifications, and even offer your own additional services for AtoM.
• #7 We also do everything we can to enrich our user community with additional resources and ensure there are no barriers or paywalls to using the application. Our documentation is also freely available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC BY SA), and we maintain and actively participate in a free public User forum. The creative commons license means that, like the application itself, you are free to share, copy and redistribute our docs in any medium, and you can adapt the materials for any purpose, so long as you give appropriate credit and distribute your contributions under the same license. We also maintain a wiki with additional resources, including a list of those created by our community, and try to regularly provide free webinar recordings and video tutorials via our YouTube channel.
• #8 Standards based: Part of ensuring that AtoM metadata remains interoperable and embracing a larger community is to provide compliance with international and national content standards. AtoM aims to simplify description – content standards such as ISAD(g) and others are internally mapped to metadata standards (e.g. EAD or XML) so users can enter data in familiar fields. We crosswalk each additional standards based template, so you can easily switch to a different display standard (such as the Canadian RAD standard, the U.S DACS standard, MODS, or Dublin Core) without having to change your data. Helpful tooltips drawn straight from the standards are provided with every field. Users can even set different display standards within the same repository – and even within different levels of the same archival unit!
• #9 Multilingual: All user interface elements and database content can be translated into multiple languages, using our built-in translation interface. At installation, AtoM also includes many default user interface translations, all generously provided by volunteer translators from the AtoM User Community. If you are interested in contributing translations to our user community, we have resources on our wiki to help you get started!
• #10 In AtoM you can create a multi-repository portal in which each archival institution can customize its own page with a logo and banner, a custom background color, and custom content using HTML and in-line CSS. Select a background color with an intuitive color picker Add an API key and enable Dynamic Google Maps to identify the location of your repository from the address information entered Repository logo and background color will appear on all related descriptions throughout AtoM to distinguish them in a multi-repository environment The Search box can toggle between global search and repository-specific searching.
• #11 Archivematica integration: And of course, AtoM comes with built-in integration with the other open source application developed by Artefactual Systems: Archivematica. Archivematica will allow you to ingest diverse digital materials and run them through standards-based workflows that follow the OAIS reference model, to produce interoperable, system agnostic Archival Information Packages (AIPs) for long-term preservation. Archivematica will also normalize your digital object masters into smaller, user-friendly access formats for dissemination, based on user-adjustable policy rules. This Dissemination Information Package (DIP) can then be uploaded to an existing description in AtoM for arrangement, further description, and access. AtoM will store a Unique Universal Identifier (UUID) for both the original file and the source AIP, preserving a link between your access copy and your preserved content.
• #12 AtoM was originally developed out of a collaborative effort between the International Council on Archives and UNESCO, with seed funding support from institutions such as The Hogeschool Van Amsterdam Archiefschool, Direction des Archives de France, the World Bank Group Archives, and the United Arab Emirates Centre for Documentation and Research. The 1.0-beta release of the application was launched at the 2008 ICA Congress in Kuala Lumpur, and the first non-beta release, version 1.1, was released in late 2010 after a long period of beta testing with dozens of institutions.
• #13 We’ve come a long way since then! In October of 2013, we released the 2.0 version of AtoM, which included an improved search index for better scalability and performance, a new user interface look and feel, faceted search and browse, and more. We also launched a new website, and began overhauling the project documentation. The project continues to grow and improve with every major release, and we are currently preparing for our 2.4 release in 2017.
• #14 The AtoM project has a vibrant international community of users. This map shows all the different locales where AtoM has been installed, up to version 2.1 – and these are just the places we know of.
• #15 You can find many more examples of AtoM sites from around the world on our wiki Users page. If you don’t see your institution’s AtoM installation listed here and would like to, please send us an email and we will be happy to add it!
• #16 To support the original and ongoing aims of the project, AtoM has always been, and will continue to be, released as open source software - currently, we release it under a strong viral license (AGPLv3) to ensure that the application is not forked or incorporated by someone wishing to charge access to its enhancements. In maintaining our commitment to the original project aims, we also seek in every way we can to lower or remove barriers to the project resources: to this end, Artefactual not only releases the code via our Downloads page and our code repository, we also make our documentation available, our webinar recordings, our wiki resources, our presentation slides, and even as much free support as we can offer via the AtoM user forum, all free of charge. With every major release, we also budget time to review and address many of the bugs reported to us by our user community, with the hope of seeing the project improve progressively in both large and small ways with each public release. To sustain ourselves as a business and be able to continue maintaining and developing AtoM, Artefactual also offer additional paid services - including application hosting, consultation, training, theming, data migrations, and of course, custom development. This business model is sometimes known as "Professional open source" - at Artefactual, we think of it as the Bounty model of open-source development. As a company, we use our resources from these additional services to continue supporting the ongoing maintenance work required to keep the AtoM project sustainable and growing. Every time we are contracted to develop a custom feature for an institution, we work with the client to ensure the feature respects established national and international standards, and we try to generalize its implementation so it can not only meet the use case of the institution in question, but also be of benefit to the entire AtoM user community. We then include all of these enhancements in the next public release. Whenever possible, we also accept bug fixes and code contributions from our user community, and will handle the review and merging of this code into public releases, as well as its maintenance through subsequent releases, thereby reducing the burden on individual contributors over time. We have a number of development resources on our wiki to help users get started. This is the community-based development heart of the AtoM project. The growth and direction of AtoM is determined by the individuals and institutions who recognize that open-source software requires maintenance to continue to be viable and relevant in the long-term, and who sponsor features, enhancements, and bug fixes that will benefit the project as a whole in addition to meeting their particular institutional or individual needs. This means that AtoM, as an application, is truly what our community makes of it - the current version, like all versions before it, has been made possible thanks to contributions large and small from dozens of institutions and individuals. You can see this on the release announcements we maintain and on the Roadmap part of our wiki for the upcoming releases, where we try to acknowledge all the different institutions and individuals that have helped to make the new features possible. This is one of the joys of community-based development - seeing what we can accomplish as a community when we are all working towards common goals. It also means that institutions with more resources are able to invest in solutions that not only meet their needs, but also benefit the community at large and assist smaller, under-resourced institutions to have access to the same tools and applications. Everyone benefits from any single contribution - whether it is development or contributions to the project in other ways (documentation, user forum participation, papers and presentations, provision of services by other service providers, formation of user groups, and more). Whenever possible, we try to provide further avenues for connection and dissemination of resources via the user forum and places like the Community resources section of the wiki.