As the metadata intern for the AMNH Archive Project, it’s been my job to evaluate several archival content management systems (CMS), weighing them against a detailed set of functional requirements previously established by my colleagues — in short, to find a good place for our stuff. I’ve examined ArchivesSpace, AtoM, Collective Access, and xEAC, and I can say with some certainty that there is currently no open-source option for managing both EAC-CPF and EAD records that meets all of our needs. However, as these applications are all under active development, we are hopeful they will be improved over time, especially with regard to EAC support, and we will still forge ahead with the best option available to us at present.

It’s been a challenging exercise, and I’ve learned a lot in the process. It has required switching between operating systems, including OS X, Windows 7, and Ubuntu, using VirtualBox and fine-tuning configurations therein, forking GitHub repos and updating code after major releases, lots of terminal/command line work, data imports, exports, and migrations, examining log files, troubleshooting, troubleshooting, and more troubleshooting.

Below I’ll give a brief report on my experience with each application so far. Please do comment below if you’d like some more detail, or if you’d like to share your own experience using one of these platforms.