We are happy to announce that the first publicly accessible site using the next version of CollectiveAccess (version 0.6 aka “Providence”) is online. The Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin has used a development version of 0.6 to create Wir waren so frei…, an online archive and exhibition featuring thousands of photos, films and videos documenting the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and 1990. The site uses CollectiveAccess 0.6’s enhanced support for flexible metadata schemas, multilingual cataloguing, video and mapping to create a bi-lingual application that previously would have required extensive custom development.

We continue to roll out version 0.6 to our partners and collaborators for testing and evaluation. The initial group of four users is being expanded to 20 over the next two months. We expect a first public release of CollectiveAccess 0.6 later in the summer.

Thanks to all of our partners and collaborators for their support during development of 0.6! And congratulations to the Kinemathek on the debut of Wir waren so frei…!

Have a happy Spring!

The Museum of Jewish Heritage’s CollectiveAccess-based Online Collection has won a Best of the Web Award (Research category) at the Museums and the Web 2009 conference in Indianapolis. Congratulations to the team at MJH!

CollectiveAccess will be demonstrated, and future plans discussed, at the Moving Image Access Open Source Group meeting to be held at WGBH-TV in Boston on 28 January 2009. There will also be presentations by WGBH developers and an update from the world of PBCore. You can read more about it in our Events section. Hope to see you there.

We are pleased to announce the release of version 0.55 of CollectiveAccess! This is an incremental release with several significant new features as well as many bug fixes and minor improvements. This is the first release under the new “CollectiveAccess” name. Previous releases were under the name “OpenCollection.” Changes since version 0.54 include:

• Full set of inter-relations between collections and other authorities.
• Support for document attachment in all authorities. The ability to attach documents in any format to objects is now extended to all types of authority items.
• Configurable checkbox “flags” in all authorities. The object “flags” feature - a feature allowing for the configuration of any number of yes/no checkbox fields to an object - is extended to all types of authority items. It is now also possible to search on authority flags.
• Entity contact logs. A contact log is added to entity authority items. This allows for tracking of contacts with people and organizations in an CollectiveAccess database.
• Object extent recording tool. The existing objects ‘extent’ text field is replaced with a numeric field and a configurable units choice list. This allows for improved reporting on extent information.
• Support for watermarking of uploaded media (ImageMagick/Magickwand image processing backend only). The ability to automatically insert a watermark message or logo on all uploaded images is now implemented.
• Additional cropping and trimming options for uploaded media (ImageMagick/Magickwand image processing backend only). It is now possible to auto-trim uploaded images by a number of pixels or percentage of width and height; it is also now possible to specify the point from which images are cropped when being used to fill a bounding box.
• Fixed bug in the default configuration that could cause part of an object ID number value to be partially deleted when saving the object.
• Fixed bug that caused “Call-time pass-by-reference has been deprecated” warnings to be issued in some PHP configurations.
• Fixed bug that caused “Couldn’t write file: Can’t set property output_mimetype; Image is too small to be output as Tilepic; minimum dimensions are 10×10 pixels” errors when using the ImageMagick (but not MagickWand) backend.
• Added search on object storage locations to object “more options” search interface.
• Moved object-vocabulary term tab from under “cataloguing” to under “relationships.”
• Fixed windows sizing and style-sheet issues in place and vocabulary term info-popup windows.
• Added curatorial tab with support for creating tours (meant for front-end presentation in a future version of CA-Access).

As of November 19th the OpenCollection project has changed its name to CollectiveAccess. The software, development team and project objectives remain the same. Only the name has changed.

Since its inception the OpenCollection project has been dedicated to producing free, unrestricted open-source software for museum and archives. However, a former institutional project partner believes that the name “OpenCollection” itself (and only the name - not the software) is not free. They believe that they have some ownership interest in the name which competes with the Project’s ownership interest. After some consideration we have concluded that, while we clearly own the name, we would prefer to put our energy into continuing development of useful software tools for the community rather than waste resources debating the status of a label.

Thus we are rechristening our project as CollectiveAccess. An updated version (version 0.55) is available now with the new name and many new features. Development on a major new upgrade is ongoing with an expected release date in the first quarter of 2009.

If you are a member of our e-mailing list you will have to resubscribe by clicking on the “Mailing List” link on the left hand side of the page. You should also update any web bookmarks to point to http://www.collectiveaccess.org.

We would like to thank our users, partners and advisors for their continued support of the project. We look forward to many exciting developments in the coming months!

Here’s an interesting blog post about one users experience with OpenCollection. We’re glad you had fun Jesse!

OpenCollection is now available in a “QuickStart” download that includes all of the software you need to run a basic install of OpenCollection on Windows 2003, XP and Vista in one easy-to-install package. The QuickStart is the easiest way to try out OpenCollection on your Windows PC without having to muck around with server configurations. Just download it, unzip it onto your “C:” drive and fire it up! 

You can learn more about the QuickStart in the download area.

This bugfix release addresses more than a dozen issues brought to our attention since the release of OpenCollection 0.54 two months ago. The complete list of changes is available in the changelog included in both the fresh install and update download packages. You can download the updater and see a list of changes here.

Please keep the bug reports coming! We can only fix issues if we know about them. Please file bugs on our bug tracker at http://trac.opencollection.org/newticket

For those of you planning to attend the International Conference Dublin Core and Metadata Applications in Berlin on September 22 - 26, 2008, be sure to check out the presentations by OpenCollection project team members Seth Kaufman and Seth van Hooland introducing OpenCollection and exploring issues of metadata quality and assessment. We hope to see you soon in Berlin!

We are pleased to announce the release of version 0.54 of OpenCollection! This is an incremental release with several significant new features as well as many bug fixes and minor improvements. Changes since version 0.53 include:

• Object representations can now be put in arbitrary order
• Code 39, Code 128, EAN-13, PostNet and UPC format barcodes are now supported on labels
• Items in the object “history” tab (type-specific timestamped blocks of text) may now be sorted ascending or descending
• Added support for GoogleMaps new ‘terrain’ map type
• New feature for managing a hierarchy of storage locations and recording current and previous locations of objects
• New feature for recording acquisition of use rights and licensing of use rights for objects
• Basic reporting features are now implemented with options for HTML and tab-delimited output. Any text search can be used as the basis of a report. These reporting features will be greatly expanded and improved in upcoming releases
• The “preview” object tab has been renamed “summary” and is now used to summarize object cataloguing prior to editing
• New user preference added allowing users to specify whether upon clicking on an object in a search result the summary tab or the “basic” editing tab is displayed
• The MagickWand PHP module is no longer required in order for OC to use the ImageMagick image processing back-end. OC will always use MagickWand if it is available; if it is not it will attempt to use the ImageMagick commandline utilities as pointed to in the external_applications.conf file; if that doesn’t work the OC will attempt to us the PHP built-in GD graphics processing library
• Default antialiasing of derivative images generated by OC has been reduced; many users complained the default setting resulted in images that were too “soft” You can still customize this setting by editing the media_processing.conf file
• Changed CSS setup; ‘general.css’ now houses stock styles that may be overridden on a per-site basis in the new ’site.css’ stylesheet
• PDF support no longer requires Ghostscript (still required to generate thumbnails of pages however)
• PDFs now supported on Windows
• Microsoft Word documents can now be uploaded as object representations via the new MSWord media plugin
• Object idno (aka. accession number) field maximum width increased from 30 characters to 255 characters

You can download the updated software at http://www.opencollection.org/index.php?g=download&s=opencollection.This version is the last of the 0.5x series. The next version, 0.6, will feature support for localization and multiple languages, OAI-PMH, data ingestion facilities, improved reporting, and more. The planned release date for version 0.6 is late summer 2008.If you have questions or suggestions about this release, or anything OpenCollection-related contact us at support@opencollection.org. Have a great summer!