Whirl-i-Gig has worked with museums, archives and scientific research projects since 1995. In that time, Whirl-i-Gig has consistently found that affordable, open and extensible cataloguing systems are virtually impossible to find. Beginning in 2003 Whirl-i-Gig, in partnership with a number of institutions in the United States and Europe, launched development efforts to fill this commercial gap. The result is the solution we now know as CollectiveAccess. A quick summary of how we got from there to here follows below.

Planning and development of general-purpose cataloguing and collections management software started in 2003, using lessons learned during the development of earlier systems for the American Museum of Natural History Library and the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York.

By 2004 core functionality had been implemented. Museums in the fields of natural history and cultural heritage began pilot cataloguing, providing useful feedback on both the datamodel and the user interface.

Initial adopters continued use of the software as functionality was greatly expanded and generalized.

The Coney Island History Project (CIHP) in Brooklyn, New York, adopted CollectiveAccess as their collections management and online presentation platform, funding a series of extensions to accommodate their oral history program’s need for geo-referenced images and audio recordings.

That same year, the web-based high-resolution image viewer created for CollectiveAccess was released separately. Although typically employed as an integral part of the larger CollectiveAccess package the viewer was easily integrated into other systems and therefore a candidate for early release. The viewer has since found a home in scientific applications such as MorphBank.

In August 2006 CollectiveAccess was publicly announced as an open source project. A workplan was devised to ready it for public release under the name OpenCollection.

In late 2006, the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York, adopted CollectiveAccess as a platform for its Artists of the East End project (federally funded via the Institute of Museum and Library Services). As with the CIHP, the Parrish supported development of generally useful features essential for their project.

In March 2007, CollectiveAccess (version 0.50) was first released to the public under the open source GNU Public License with the name OpenCollection.

Response to the open-source release was immediate and enthusiastic. A number of museums, archives, libraries and historical societies began to adopt CollectiveAccess as a collections management system, or to support research projects, online exhibitions or cost-effective public access to existing proprietary collections systems. By the end of 2007 the project was aware of more than a dozen working installations of the software (with hints of at least another dozen "unannounced" installations).

In late 2007, the project began a design and development collaboration with the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin. The collaboration, which continues to the present day, paved the way for a redesign and reimplementation of CollectiveAccess in version 0.6 as a flexible, modern, multi-standard and multi-lingual application.

Development of both the software and user base continued in 2008, culminating with the release of version 0.55 in November. Simultaneously development of components for the "next generation" 0.6 branch began. By the end of 2008 a minimally usable version of version 0.6 was available for testing.

In November, after a dispute with an early institutional collaborator over the name OpenCollection, it was decided to change the name of the project to CollectiveAccess. Other than the name nothing changed; the software, development team and project objectives remained the same and progress continued apace on version 0.6.

2009 was a year of rapid growth for CollectiveAccess. The first working installations of version 0.6 started up in February. In May the first publicly accessible 0.6 system went online for Wir Waren so Frei, a Deutsche Kinemathek-produced archive of images and film documenting the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The CollectiveAccess development team worked hard on development and deployment of 0.6, continuously integrating "in the field" experience into the product. A number of new and exciting collaborations were begun encompassing digital motion picture preservation, XML-based oral history documentation, film archives management, time-based cataloguing, exhibit floor presentation and mobile applications.

As 2009 drew to a close CollectiveAccess was in use at over 40 institutions (that we know about). Most 0.55-based collaborators had been migrated to 0.6 and the focus shifted to preparing a first public release of the new software.

2010 promises to be another exciting year for the project, with projects on five continents (if you know someone in Australia who needs collections management software...) and a long list of features to implement!

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