The Small Archives Book of Dreams

This is where we can talk about the systems that we would like to have. It can be a complete picture of the ultimate system or the one favorite detail you have most missed in all your experiences with content management systems; add a paragraph to this page or add a link to another page, whichever you like. Whether we find we are all interested in the same things, or we are wildly different, it will be interesting.

1. XML Creation and Editing - It is clear that the flexibility and software-independence that XML gives makes it the best choice for managing metadata. The problem has always been that XML is cumbersome to work with. I would really like to have the ability to create and maintain XML files for various purposes directly in objects in repositories. I would like to have all of the user interface niceties that Access and Filemaker have, to do things like create data input forms that hide the XML, pull sets of values for pull down lists from an onotology, etc.