Project History
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.
2003
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.
2004
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.
2005
Initial adopters continued use of the software as functionality was greatly expanded and
generalized.
2006
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.
2007
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.
2008
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
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
0.6 was further developed and all remaining 0.55 installations converted. Collaborations with several
film archives and art museums resulted in many refinements and a much improved version of
Pawtucket,
the CollectiveAccess public-access module.
2011
Version 1.0 for both
Providence, the back-end cataloguing application and
Pawtucket, the public-access interface,
were released in May, the result of more than two years of work to completely re-architect and re-write the original 0.55
code. Development continued unabated through the year and version 1.1, released in December 2011, included a number of features requested by
our growing user community, which by the end of the year included an estimated 250 institutional users distributed across every continent save Antarctica.
A dedicated group of volunteers from these far-flung outposts helped to expand language support. New translations for Italian, Swedish,
and Polish, and improved ones for Dutch and French were added. We hope to add many more languages in 2012!
2012
As 2012 begins the development team is hard at work on version 1.2 which will add several long-awaited features including
a batch cataloguing system, improved tools for creating relationships, improved embedding and extraction of media metadata,
support for e-commerce and licensing activities and finer-grained access control. We expect to release version 1.2 in April.
We're also hard at work on mobile applications, both as integral components of CA and with partners. Stay tuned for more!
