Saturday morning I attended two related sessions: “Digital Asset Management Systems or DAMit, How am I supposed to Maintain all These Files?” and “Open Source”.
Both of these sessions gave me a sense of what up and coming open source systems offer archives and special collections.
The systems discussed were:
Collective Access– launched in 2004, and soon to be in its 4th edition with a mobile application coming out by the end of the year. This system isn’t object centered- authority items can be included and given equal weight as well. Matt Shoemaker from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania presented his use of Collective Access.
2. webDAM– a cloud based system.
3. VUDL& VUFind- both are home grown systems out of Villanova and offer a back-end and public access point for digital objects.
4. ArchivesSpace– by 2013 archivists will have the opportunity to take advantage of the back-end services offered by Archivists Toolkit and the public access face of Archon through ArchivesSpace. Mark Marienzo presented on the development of this open source tool.
These two sessions archivists real solutions for managing digital content- as well as systems and features to look forward to in the coming months and years.