OAC Archivists' Toolkit and Archon Hosting Service

Pilot Release

Background and Scope of the Service

The CDL Digital Special Collections (DSC) Program is seeking to test and assess its capacity to host the Archivists' Toolkit (AT) and Archon archival data management systems, for use by OAC contributors.  By hosting one or both of these applications, we are seeking to provide a technical infrastructure for institutions that do not have the capacity to host the backend databases locally.  Institutions would only need to implement the application clients to use the systems.

Our goal is to 1) provide you with different options of applications, depending on what is best suited to your institution’s needs, and 2) help your institution avoid costs associated with creating or hosting an archival data management system locally. 

At the same time, the CDL benefits by advancing the goals of the OAC to become a centralized, publicly-accessible gateway to finding aids and collection descriptions of resources maintained by institutions throughout California.  Support for the AT and Archon also promotes efficient ingest procedures and minimizes CDL costs, given the applications’ capacity to generate EAD finding aids.  The AT additionally generates METS digital objects, which are supported by the CDL.

Based on this test phase, we will be able to determine if and how broadly we can offer one or more of these services to a wider set of OAC contributors, with the potential to provide the following additional range of associated services:

• Long-term and persistent management of data
• Data recovery and backup
• Centralized system and software upgrades
• Technical/database support and user support
• Workshops and hands-on training (to be determined)

Hosting services also comprises transitioning users to newer software versions, as they are released (including migration to a single hybrid version of AT and Archon, which may be released at some point in the future).

We will initially run version 1.5.9 of the AT and version 2.22 of Archon.

Beta Test Participants

We will be working with 10 institutions in September/October 2009 to help us assess our capacity to host the applications.  We will provide access to the AT and Archon backend databases via local clients, technical/database support, and limited user support to institutions participating in the testing phase. 

Expectations for Beta Testers

• Primary contacts at each institution should ideally be familiar with hands-on use of the AT or Archon (e.g., through the Society of American Archivists workshop series).
• Primary contacts at each institution will be responsible for downloading and installing the AT client software. For AT users, we will provide a single user account (Level 4 permission) to the primary contact. In the case of Archon, primary contacts will only need a web browser to access the database.
• Primary contacts at each institution will be asked to complete a number of tasks, participate in a brief evaluation of the service, and participate in 1-2 conference calls; we anticipate all activities to take no more than 5-8 hours.
• Create 2-5 user accounts
• Create 2-3 finding aids
• Create 2-5 subject or other controlled vocabulary records (to associate with the finding aid)
• Create 2-5 name records (to associate with the finding aid)
• Link subject and name records to the finding aid
• Export EAD, MARCXML, and print finding aid(s)
• Generate 2-5 reports (e.g., list of accessions, deaccessions, etc.)
• Import 2-5 EAD finding aids
• Submit sample finding aids to preview (i.e., not publish) in OAC

Beta Test Timeline

October/November 2009