Version 1.1 of Providence, the CollectiveAccess core cataloguing and collections management application has been released. You can get your very own copy on our download page. Release notes are available here.

On this 107th birthday of Isamu Noguchi we send congratulations to the Noguchi Garden Foundation and Museum for the launch of their CollectiveAccess-based Catalogue Raisonné!

CollectiveAccess project developer Julia Weist will discussing CA and it’s use in small and medium size institutions as part of the Open Source panel at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archive Conference (MARAC) on Saturday, October 22nd, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. If you’re going to be at the conference, you might also want to check out the  Digital Asset Management Systems or DAMit, How Am I Supposed to Maintain All These Files? panel, moderated by Matt Shoemaker, Historical Society of Pennsylvania archivist and coordinator of their CollectiveAccess installation.

Bram Wiercx of FARO, the Flemish interface for cultural heritage, will be discussing running CollectiveAccess as a cloud-based service using RedHat OpenShift clusters at the DISH 2011 conference in Rotterdam, the Netherlands on December 7th. You can read more about it at http://www.dish2011.nl/sessions/open-source-software-platform-collectiveacces-as-a-service-solution.

Thanks to our friends at Pure Sign, there are now two CollectiveAccess-related Drupal modules available. Both will let you integrate content in your CollectiveAccess system with your Drupal-based web site either directly or via Feeds. Very handy!

You can take a look at http://drupal.org/project/collectiveaccess and  http://drupal.org/project/collectiveaccess_feeds

I would like to thank the development team of CollectiveAccess on behalf of the 20 graduate students of my class on document management at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. In groups of three or four, the students of the first year of a Master in Information Science had to and configure Providence and Pawtucket in order to build a prototype for the art collection of our university. This collection containing works of for example James Ensor, has been managed until now in an Access database and a proprietary Digital Asset Management
System, which does not really allow an efficient management of the collection. This exercice allowed students to gain hands-on experience with the configuration and installation process: some groups installled the software on a commercial hosting package and others ran it locally on their laptops. More importantly, students went through all the important conceptual steps of building a document management system: creation of different document types and configuration of a specific metadata schema for each type, creation of controlled vocabularies and bringing those elements to the front-end. Most students used the graphical interface of the software for these steps, but two groups immediately build up the system with the help of a profile.

This project definitively took up a lot of their time over the second semester, but all groups presented working prototypes and everyone was thrilled at the skills they learned throughout the process. So thank you for providing us with CollectiveAccess and for all the support on the forum! Anyone interested in some teaching materials and reports that the groups have written (in French) can contact me on svhoolan@ulb.ac.be

Have a great summer!

The next meeting of the New York City CollectiveAccess Users’ Group will take place at the Coney Island History Project exhibition space under the Wonderwheel in Coney Island on Thursday, June 30th at 3pm. We’ll be previewing the upcoming 1.1 version, discussing future development and looking at users’ projects.

The History Project is on West 12th Street between the Bowery and the Boardwalk, right across from the new ScreamZone and down the block from the sideshow. Just look for the Wonderwheel neon sign and you’ll find us.

Drinks will be served. RSVP to info@collectiveaccess.org

FARO, the Flemish Center for Cultural Heritage, will be hosting a “hands-on” CollectiveAccess workshop on June 24th at their headquarters in Brussels. More information can be found at  http://www.faronet.be/kalender/hands-on-workshop-collectiveaccess.

Version 1.0 of Pawtucket, the CollectiveAccess public access web presentation and access application, has been released. You can get a copy on our downloads page. This release is meant to work with databases created using version 1.0 of Providence, CollectiveAccess’ collections management and cataloguing tool, also available on our downloads page.

Ring the bells… version 1.0 of Providence, the CollectiveAccess back-end cataloguing and collections management tool has been released. You can get a copy on our downloads page.

We’ll be releasing the 1.0 version of Pawtucket, the online collections publishing tool for CollectiveAccess, later this week.

Thanks for being patient as we worked towards release! We know this release has been overdue and are looking forward to a 1.1 release in just a few months.