CollectiveAccess developer Seth Kaufman will be giving a presentation at the Third International Workshop on Image Processing in Art Investigations at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on Thursday, May 27th at 12.30pm. You can learn more about the conference at http://www.digitalpaintinganalysis.org/IP4AI3. Hope to see you there!
A tour of CollectiveAccess is now available! This slideshow highlights the key features of CollectiveAccess and provides an overview of the software’s key components. Get started to see what CollectiveAccess has to offer!
CollectiveAccess developers will be participating in two upcoming conferences:
We had planned to release the next major update to CollectiveAccess, version 0.6, before the end of 2009. Well that obviously didn’t happen. But even so, we managed to get quite a lot done in 2009, from major progress in the development of 0.6 to deployments at more than 40 sites around the world. And, just in time for 2010, we are pleased to debut our new expanded project web site and wiki.
While 0.6 isn’t packaged for download just yet, we’re close enough to a release that we’ve opened the code repository up for public access. If you are handy with Subversion and want to give 0.6 a spin you’ll find all the information you need on the new Download page. Let us know what you think and feel free to post your questions on our support forum.
Have a Happy New Year. We look forward to an exciting 2010!
PhilaPlace, an interactive exploration of the neighborhoods of Philadelphia, debuts today at http://www.philaplace.org. Developed by The Historical Society of Pennsylvania and Night Kitchen Interactive, the project uses the soon-to-be-released 0.6 version of CollectiveAccess to manage the foundation of the site, an online archive of thousands of images and videos from HSP, its content partners and site visitors.
The public front-end was custom developed for the project, but all of the back-end features developed for the project will be freely available in the next release of CollectiveAccess under the same GPL open source license as everything else.
Congratulations to everyone at HSP and Night Kitchen who worked so hard to make PhilaPlace a reality!
Bram Wiercx of FARO (Flemish interface centre for cultural heritage, Belgium) will be talking about his “Pilot CollectiveAccess & Cloud hosting” project as part of the “Open Technology” panel of the Digital Strategies for Heritage (DISH) 2009 conference in Rotterdam on December 9th, 2009 at 2pm. If you’re going to be there you might want to check it out.
We are not part of the presentation (we only found about it on Google!), but are thrilled that Bram is sharing his experiences. Cloud storage, including support for Amazon S3 and Nirvanix, is part of the plan for upcoming releases.
We look forward to hearing more about what Bram has been up to!
We frequently receive questions about whether CollectiveAccess is SPECTRUM compliant. Usually our answer is that it can be, but only if you set up that way. Until now…
We’re very pleased to announce that a SPECTRUM based installation profile is finished!
Very briefly, SPECTRUM is the UK and international standard for museums. It was developed in the late 1990’s and continues to be the most widely accepted standard for museum collection management. With 21 Procedures, 44 Information Groups, and nearly 480 Information Units - SPECTRUM sets out to capture and organize all the data that a museum should record about the objects in their collections. The SPECTRUM documentation is freely available as a PDF download (once you register). At a whopping 393 pages, it is a comprehensive document and there is no wonder why SPECTRUM has become THE standard for museums and cultural heritage institutions around the world.
There are three levels of compliance for SPECTRUM: basic, standard, and full. The SPECTRUM installation profile for CollectiveAccess attempts to be fully *compliant. This means that all Information Units are present as data entry fields or possible through the relational structure of the software. It therefore (hopefully) records the necessary data for the 21 Procedures. However, this profile is still new and very beta. It requires further testing and feedback by users, so we can make it better and more usable.
So please install the SPECTRUM profile and let us know how it’s working for you, your museum, and your collections! Thanks B-)
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*It should be noted that while the SPECTRUM installation profile attempts to be compliant, we have not and have no interest to become officially compliant at this time.
Every so often we get asked if it is possible to integrate Fedora digital repository software with CollectiveAccess. Up until now our answer has always been “we’d like to support this, and one of these days we will.”
Well we finally have! (for the upcoming version 0.6 at least)
With generous support from an institutional user we’ve been hard at work developing an API that makes possible storage or automated mirroring of media catalogued using CollectiveAccess in external repositories. Once configured CA will automatically add uploaded media to a targeted external repository along with an XML-serialized version of the associated metadata. Updates to existing media and metadata are also automatically pushed to the external repository, and can take advantage of Fedora’s versioning features.
The new API will make it possible to take advantage of all sorts of useful features provided by Fedora including digital preservation capabilities and enhanced interoperability with applications that consume Fedora services. Even better, the new API is not Fedora specific. We are planning support for other repositories in the coming months. Already in progress is a plug-in for IRODS, a robust framework providing distributed rules-based data storage. We are also investigating the feasibility of supporting Amazon S3 cloud storage via the API, which holds the promise of affordable and expandable large scale storage.
There is still much work to be done on the API and Fedora plug-in, but progress has been steady and we are excited that it will be a part of the 0.6x feature set!
We’re pleased to announce that there is now a New York CollectiveAccess user group! We are excited and gratified that a community of real users with active and ongoing projects has coalesced around CA. Dreams do come true :-)
The group meets every six weeks at a different member location for a wide-ranging discussion that includes a project presentation by the host member followed by an open Q&A. At least one member of the CollectiveAccess development team tries to make it to each meeting.
The current membership represents a cross-section of New York non-profits and includes several art museums, performing arts organizations, natural history and historical institutions. While all of the current members are based in New York City, the group is open to all institutional users of CollectiveAccess.
If you would like to attend a meeting please contact Ryan Donaldson (RDonaldson@durst.org) for more information.
We’re very excited to announce that Providence will support Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and GeoNames! Through our efforts to build a highly configurable cataloging tool we understand the important role controlled vocabularies and authority lists play in creating a functional, interoperable, and sustainable system. While CollectiveAccess has always supported authorities lists, these often had to be constructed in-house or licensed from expensive services. Now CA can utilize Library of Congress’ freely available subject headings for intellectual access control, and GeoNames for place name consistency.
LCSH and GeoNames will be included in the “out-of-the-box” Installation Profiles for Standards like DublinCore (done!) and MARC (in development). They can also be easily added at anytime.
Authority control is awesome and important, so it’s really satisfying to be able to offer these new features as we drive toward the party in Providence!
