NeoArch

Yesterday, I presented to the Kentucky Council on Archives‘ User Group for Content Management and Open Source Archival Software on our use of Archon at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Archives. I gave my presentation just prior to the group participating in the SAA’s “Archon…making it work for you!” webinar that was led by Archon creators Chris Prom and Scott Schwartz. I am very thankful to the user group for inviting me to talk about Archon, and I was really excited to do so because we have had a great experience with the product. Our Archon installation can be found here. I would recommend Archon to anyone who wanted to manage and provide access to archival collections.

The user group asked that I discuss why we decided to use Archon and how we use it. Below are my ever-so-brief notes on the topic.

Why we selected Archon

1. It had a really nice web interface (both public and administrative)
2. Chris Prom’s user interactions articles in American Archivist gave me hope for the project at its earliest stages
3. It was easy to train student workers to use (contextual DACS help)
4. It runs on LAMP stack (No Java, XSLT)
5. It makes the migration of the types of legacy data we had relatively easy (MARC, EAD, CSV)
6. It is fast (my initial tests with Archivists’ Toolkit reports were somewhat slow)
7. It is free (no cost, license allows for adaptation )

How we use Archon

1. We provide web access to finding aids for collection
2. We keep track of accessions
3. We process collections (We feel that it facilitates MPLP and processing large collections)
4. It allows us to describe yet hide closed collections (visible to us, not the world)
5. It provides us with smart searching (records are returned in a hierarchical context, so it’s not just Google style searching)
6. It allows us to supply virtual arrangement
7. We use it to keep track of our offsite collections  (user defined field mapped to EAD UnitID)
8. We use it to export to our online catalog (MARC, EAD)
9. We use the digital library for some digital objects

Downsides

1. It has no real reporting suite
2. Accessioning seems more robust in Archivists’ Toolkit
3. It does not support OAI
4. It does not support Premis
5. It does not support a multi-site or collaborative setup (in the way I would envision it)
6. I am unsure of what the final ArchivesSpace product will be like
7. The user community does not seem as active as some OSS projects