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 - Do these really need an explanation? Library of Congress Subject Headings were established and are maintained by the Library of Congress in the United States. They are used by libraries, archives, museums and other information collections to organize and access the intellectual content of their assets. They help to describe the aboutness of things, and link things together that share the same aboutness. LCSH in CA works as a subject authority lookup that takes search text, passes it through the LCSH web-service (http://id.loc.gov) and returns a dropdown with search results. A selected subject heading is stored as text, ID, and its URL.  

• GeoNames - This is a open source and free solution to other expensive licensed geographic databases. It contains over 8 million geographic names! Available under the creative common attribution license, GeoNames in CA functions as a geographic lookup that takes search text, passes it to the GeoNames search service and provides a dropdown with search results (ordered by score). The selected geoname is stored as both text (name, country, continent and ID) and the service URL identifier.

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!

As mentioned in the previous post, work continues apace on Pawtucket, the public-access web front-end to CollectiveAccess version 0.6. In addition to Wir waren so frei…, a photo archive documenting the fall of the Berlin Wall that went online in May, two additional sites are now running Pawtucket installations: the Grand Valley State University Art Gallery in Michigan and our old friends at the Coney Island History Project.

Pawtucket is a big improvement on the old CA-Access software we provide for CA version 0.5x. It capitalizes on various new features in CA version 0.6 (aka. “Providence”) to close many “feature holes” in CA-Access, including:

• Multilingual support: it’s easy to publish your collection in any number of languages. Facilities are provided to support translation of both static site text as well as catalogued content.
• User tagging, commenting and rating: one of the most requested “Web 2.0″ features is finally here, just in time for Web 3.0(!)
• Faceted browsing: another oft-requested feature, faceted browsing enables users to explore your collection using the same controlled vocabularies and authority lists used for cataloguing. It’s a wonderful tool for discovering and navigating relationships between items that might not be apparent using a search interface.
• Curated sets: Pawtucket can display ordered and annotated groups of items created using the back-end set management tools of Providence as online exhibitions or slideshows.

Pawtucket will be released along with Providence at the end of October (it does not work with CA version 0.5x). But wait, there’s more… we’re already hard at work on the second iteration of Pawtucket, in collaboration with a group of our New York-based users. The update, which we expect to release in the Winter, includes additional browsing features, expanded visualization options for curated sets and additional presentation options for authority data.

(BTW: If you are wondering why all of our new releases are named after cities in Rhode Island, you are not alone. All we know for sure is that Providence is where the party is when all of this is finally done.)

Sitting here in our air conditioner-less office, it suddenly dawned on us that we hadn’t posted a progress report since it was nice and cool outside. Between the development of Providence, a major upgrade (basically a rewrite) of the 0.55 version of CollectiveAccess, and providing support to our early adopters – 20 organizations in all (!) – things have been insanely busy around here.

It has been fascinating to see how Providence works (and doesn’t work) in such a variety of environments. Our initial batch of users includes film archives, historical societies, performing arts institutions, a corporate archive, art museums and galleries, an architectural archive, a video game museum, photo archives, natural history museums and even a couple of individual curators assembling Catalogue Raissonnés. Working in seven languages, our users have really stretched the software and taken us in directions that would have never occurred to us otherwise.

A lot of practical knowledge has been gained from working on these projects and Providence has benefited greatly from it. Rather than being a single-purpose collections management application (as CA 0.5x is), Providence (aka. version 0.6) is essentially a highly configurable cataloguing tool which can support most any metadata standard through straightforward configuration, not custom programming, and may be used as a platform for development of new standards or “mash-ups” of existing ones. In collaboration with our users we have already developed pre-built configurations (what we call “installation profiles”) for the DublinCore and PBCore standards, as well as use-specific configurations for architectural archives, location-centered photo archives, replacement of proprietary systems and more. Installation profiles for additional standards, including SPECTRUM, CDWA/CCO and MuseumDat are in the works. We’re also working with several institutions to implement a workable standard for cataloguing of performing arts material. All of these profiles are part of the software distribution and are freely available to all users of Providence. We’re also working on a new version of our collections publishing software. Called Pawtucket, the new software provides many features for those wishing to make their information publicly accessible, including user generated slideshows, tagging and commenting, faceted browsing and curated virtual exhibits. A few sites running early versions of Pawtucket are already online. Many more are on the way over the next few months.

We had originally planned to do a first public release in the first half of 2009 , but decided instead to focus on supporting our early-adopters and gain some real-world deployment experience. Given where we are now an October release date for a first public release (ie. a “beta”) seems very likely. If you would like to get your feet wet with Providence before October and don’t mind using SVN to get your software, drop us a line at support@collectiveaccess.org and we’ll get you rolling.

Have a great rest-of-summer!

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!