The Coney Island History Project, an historical society dedicated to preserving the legacy of the historic 125-year old New York amusement park, uses CollectiveAccess to manage and publish online its archive of photos, documents, books and oral histories, and to generate maps of geo-located photographs.
Above: souvenir photo postcard, c. 1905
First public site using version 0.6 is online We are happy to announce that the first publicly accessible site using the next version of CollectiveAccess (version 0.6 aka "Providence") is o... more
Museum of Jewish Heritage Online Collection wins Best of the Web Award The Museum of Jewish Heritage's CollectiveAccess-based Online Collection has won a Best of the Web Award (Research category) at the Museums an... more
January Moving Image Access Open Source Group Meeting in Boston CollectiveAccess will be demonstrated, and future plans discussed, at the Moving Image Access Open Source Group meeting to be held at WGBH-TV in Bo... more
CollectiveAccess (formerly known as OpenCollection) is a full-featured collections management and online access application for museums, archives and digital collections. It is designed to handle large, heterogeneous collections that have complex cataloguing requirements and require support for a variety of metadata standards and media formats. Unlike most other collections management applications, CollectiveAccess is completely web-based. All cataloging, search and administrative functions are accessed using common web-browser software, untying users from specific operating systems and making cataloguing by distributed teams and online access to collections information simple, efficient and inexpensive.
To get started with CollectiveAccess, take our tour of the software and see who is using it and what they're doing with it. Then give it a try for your own project by downloading the latest version. If you need help installing or using CollectiveAccess you can ask questions on our support forum, look at our wiki or contact us directly.
CollectiveAccess is intended as an alternative to expensive proprietary software solutions that have traditionally been used for collections cataloguing and publishing by museums, archives, libraries and other organizations. CollectiveAccess is open-source software released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2. The use of the GPL guarantees, in perpetuity, a user's right to (a) use CollectiveAccess without charge, (b) redistribute CollectiveAccess to others without limitation and (c) freely modify CollectiveAccess to meet their needs or the needs of others. Any software derived from CollectiveAccess is similarly bound by the GPL, ensuring that the software can be shared as a community resource but never used as the basis of a proprietary product.
CollectiveAccess was created and is developed by Whirl-i-Gig. A community of partner institutions contribute funding, planning and software development resources. Many contributors focus on areas of specific interest to them and it is through their efforts that CollectiveAccess has gained capabilities it would never have had otherwise. If CollectiveAccess lacks features you require let us know and, if possible, please consider joining our development effort!