Archon: A Unified Information Storage and Retrieval System for Lone Archivists, Special Collections Librarians and Curators

The University of Illinois developed an open-source collections management software program and in August 2006 began making it freely available to archivists, curators, and special collections librarians. This program gives those with limited technological resources and knowledge the ability to easily mount a variety of on-line access tools to their historical collections using ISAD(G)¹ and DACS²-compliant standards for description. Archon was created with robust interoperability using a single web-based platform for the management of collections of documents and artifacts held by archives, museums and libraries. It was developed as a "plug and play" application for easy installation on any web server or on any web hosting service. It uses common web-browser input mechanisms and SQL data storage to produce dynamic data output in the form of searchable collections websites, MARC bibliographic records (Smiraglia 1990), EAD finding aids (Pitti 268-293), and long-term preservation TXT data files. The article discusses the design concepts that lead to the University of Illinois' creation of Archon, the challenges faced by the archives community when providing descriptive access to large bodies of historical papers and records, and describes Archon's public and administrative interfaces as well as future plans for additional developments to this software program.