A unified platform for archival description and access

Christopher J. Prom, Christopher A. Rishel, Scott W. Schwartz, Kyle J. Fox

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

The archival community has developed content and data structure standards to facilitate access to the diverse and unique sets of archival records, personal papers, and manuscript collections that are held by archival repositories and special collections libraries. However, these standards are difficult for archivists to use and are often implemented in ways that negatively affect materials-handling workflows, depriving archival users of the best possible access to the totality of materials available within an individual repository. The authors propose that archival descriptive problems can be addressed by implementing a web/database application that is tailored specifically to archival needs and can be implemented with little technical knowledge. This paper describes the system architecture of one such tool, the Archon software package, which was developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Archon automates many technical tasks, such as producing a searchable website, an EAD instance or a MARC record. Although the system utilizes sophisticated algorithms and optimizations, it is easily extensible because most development takes place in an easy-to-use, object-oriented environment.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 7th ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, JCDL 2007
Subtitle of host publicationBuilding and Sustaining the Digital Environment
Pages157-166
Number of pages10
DOIs
StatePublished - 2007
Event7th ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, JCDL 2007: Building and Sustaining the Digital Environment - Vancouver, BC, Canada
Duration: Jun 18 2007Jun 23 2007

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM International Conference on Digital Libraries

Other

Other7th ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, JCDL 2007: Building and Sustaining the Digital Environment
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityVancouver, BC
Period6/18/076/23/07

Keywords

  • Archival information systems
  • Archon
  • Databases
  • Encoded archival description
  • Web interfaces

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Information Systems
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Library and Information Sciences

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