What is ICA-AtoM?

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ICA-AtoM stands for "International Council on Archives - Access to Memory". It is a web-based, open source application for standards based archival description in a multilingual, multi-repository environment.

Technical overview

System architecture

ICA-AtoM comprises:

• HTML pages served to a web browser from a web server. Apache is used in development but ICA-AtoM is also compatible with IIS
• A database on a database server. MySQL is used in development but ICA-AtoM uses a database abstraction layer and is therefore also compatible with Postgres, SQLite, SQLServer, Oracle, etc.
• PHP software code that manages requests and responses between the web clients, the application logic, and the application content stored in the database
• The symfony framework that organizes the component parts using object orientation and best practice web design patterns
• The Qubit Open Information Management Toolkit, developed by the ICA-AtoM project and customized to make the ICA-AtoM application

Web-based

All user interactions with the system (add, view, search, edit, and delete actions) take place through a web browser. Users access HTML pages on the web server; clicking a button or link triggers a PHP script that sends a command to the database and returns the output as HTML back to the user's browser.

Open source

ICA-AtoM is built with open source tools (Apache, MySQL, PHP, symfony) rather than proprietary software. The underlying Qubit Toolkit code developed by the ICA-AtoM project is itself open source, with the source code freely available for use or modification as users or other developers see fit (under the GPL version 2 license).

Therefore there is no cost to download any of the software required to run the ICA-AtoM application.

Standards-based

ICA-AtoM is built around International Council on Archives (ICA) descriptive standards:

• General International Standard Archival Description (ISAD(G)) - 2nd edition, 1999
• International Standard Archival Authority Record (Corporate bodies, Persons, Families) (ISAAR(CPF)) - 2nd edition, 2003
• International Standard For Describing Institutions with Archival Holdings (ISDIAH) - 1st edition, March 2008
• International Standard For Describing Functions (ISDF) - 1st edition, May 2007

Future iterations of ICA-AtoM will support:

• Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) - W3C Recommendation 18 August 2009

ICA-AtoM is designed to be flexible enough for adaptation to other descriptive standards; see descriptive standards.

Multilingual

All user interface elements and database content can be translated into multiple languages. The current version of ICA-AtoM (1.0 beta) supports the following languages:

• Arabic
• Dutch
• English
• Farsi
• French
• German
• Greek
• Icelandic
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Portuguese
• Slovenian
• Spanish

Multi-repository

ICA-AtoM can be used by a single institution for its own descriptions or it can be set up as a multi-repository "union list" accepting descriptions from any number of contributing institutions.