Dear colleagues,

I finally have some time to post an update on the latest activities within the ICA-AtoM project:

In November 2007, version 0.5 of the ICA-AtoM software was demonstrated and discussed in two open meetings at the ICA-CITRA conference. I've attached the presentation slides from the CITRA discussion group meetings to this posting (zoom the PDF file to 200% to see the software screen captures in full resolution).

The attendance and feedback at CITRA 2007 was very enthusiastic. Although our initial target audience was archival institutions in developing countries, it is now clear that there is an equal demand for a web-based, ICA standards compliant, multi-lingual archival description application amongst more established institutions that are preparing to upgrade from their existing technology.

Although version 1.0 of the software will be limited to archival description data-entry and web-based public access, many archivists that I've spoken to (from all four corners of the world) are interested in this functionality alone as well as the post 1.0 plans to expand ICA-AtoM into a comprehensive archives management system, in particular integration with digital repositories to support digital preservation functionality.

One of the more relevant topics that was discussed during and after CITRA was to clearly define the governance and organizational structure of the ICA-AtoM software project. During a meeting at the ICA office in Paris in December, we established the ICA-AtoM governance structure (also attached as a diagram to this posting). The ICA-AtoM Steering Committee will hold its first meeting in Amsterdam in May to work out its role and the project organizational structure in more detail.

Another exciting development is the commitment from the United Arab Emirates Center for Documentation and Research to fund the development of the ICA-AtoM software up to the delivery of v1.0 at the ICA Congress in Kuala Lumpur in July 2008.

The CDR is also working with the ICA to try and secure funding beyond that time to help us establish a long-term project infrastructure, based on the governance model, to help grow and support the community of implementors as well as ensure the ongoing maintenance and development of the ICA-AtoM software.

The ICA-AtoM project has also been collaborating at the technical, software development level with the Alouette Open Digitization Initiative. Alouette is a Canadian initiative to get digital heritage materials online and to provide tools to archives and related institutions to accomplish this. The ICA-AtoM and Aloutte projects have decided to work together to leverage time, knowledge and skills. Each of these projects is using and contributing to the underlying software (codenamed Qubit for this purpose) to meet their project objectives.

In the meanwhile, development of the software has, of course, been ongoing. We hope to have release 0.6 finished within the next couple of weeks. The 0.6 code will be made available under the GPL license at http://qubit-toolkit.googlecode.com.

This release will be tested by a small number of early implementor partners. We are forced to keep this group relatively small because the timeframe between now and July 2008 is very short. If you take a look at the 1.0 release roadmap slide from the attached CITRA presentation you will see that we still have a number of key features to complete.

We also need this interim time to complete documentation and prepare our training packages. We are making good progress with the standard software documentation. You can view this work-in-progress on the ICA-AtoM documentation wiki (http://www.ica-atom.org/docs/index.php?title=User_documentation), which will be re-formated into a user manual when it is complete. Another important element of the project will the preparation of 'train-the-trainer' packages to help build regional communities of support suitable to local cultures and languages.

Therefore, there is still a lot of work to do in the short term and we have to maintain a manageable scope and focus leading up to the ICA Congress in July. However, after that time we expect the software and project infrastructure to be ready for more widespread implementation. Hopefully some of you reading this now will be able to join us for the official launch and training sessions in Kuala Lumpur in July 2008.

Peter Van Garderen
Software Release Manager,
ICA-AtoM Project
Vancouver, Canada