Small Archives Solution Community

Steward: Ari Davidow, Jewish Women's Archive
Knowledgebase Gardener: (to be determined)Evangelist: (to be determined)

Small archives represent the long tail of cultural heritage. The mission of the Small Archive Solution Community is to address the need for small organizations to assure preservation of, dissemination of, and long term access to their cultural heritage assets. As a community we can not only further preservation access and foster knowledge sharing, but can collaborate to secure resources to develop tools, training, documentation, and general solutions. This community is intended for the thousands of small cultural heritage organizations who lack resources to implement a solution on their own.

Goals

Assumptions

Some resources on the way

Here are a couple of resources that may be useful as we work on our goals, assumptions, and come up with a working plan to organize:

ActiveFedora--this project was initially funded by the Jewish Women's Archive and carried out by MediaShelf. It provides a Ruby-on-rails interface to fedora good enough for basic admin. The original project had only one content model, however, an "oral history".

Hydra--Is intended to address the same questions as ActiveFedora: Hydra will provide a 'Lego set' of web services and templates that can be configured and reconfigured to suit a wide range of different workflows that institutions might have or might develop to manage their digital content. It is a collaboration between the Universities of Hull, Stanford and Virginia working in partnership with Fedora Commons.

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Assumptions

A "Small Archive" for purposes of this discussion, is one with limited (how limited?) access to IT resources. Such an organization will have one or fewer software developers on staff, and may not even have an active webmaster.

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