Hangout with the US-based AtoM users group - representatives from WorldBank, Dumbarton Oaks, and New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Center will be joining us
Introductions -
Jessica will introduce everyone by name and institution
It would be great if the four of you ladies could take turns telling a little bit about the size/type of institution you work for the way you are using AtoM (archival description management system, cataloging tool for digital items, both, etc.)
It would also be helpful to know some of the other systems you were considering in the run-up to selecting AtoM
Issues we would like to know more about from each of our guests perspectives:
The process of migration from your previous system to AtoM, or from no system to AtoM (importing EAD records, accession records, and making use of the physical storage features of AtoM)
IT resources/needs for implementing AtoM, ongoing maintenance, upgrades (Current level of IT support at your institution and how that has impacted your experience with AtoM)
Customization v. Sponsored Development
Experience with user support - using the AtoM Google Group, contacting AtoM directly
Features you wish it had for the U.S. archival context (MARC export, internal validator) and more about possible cost-sharing across repositories for sponsored development of those features
EAD3?
Hands-on AtoM Computer Lab.
Sample data and activities prepared (accession records and finding aids for importing and hand-entering in information).
Discussion evaluation criteria for the Nov.12th demos with TARO
Discussion items
Who
Notes
Anne-marie
Dumbarton Oaks
Repository:
small
light weight IT
Started looking in 2012
started by coming up with functional requirements: both archival and item-level description
Impressed with responsive support
AT too focused on archival desc.
wanted to be able to export
interoperable w/ other catalogs
Ingest variety of formats: excel, metadata in various formats, access
flexible, hierarchical structures
started looking at around 24, quickly down to 8
wanted something to could handle variety of material types
wanted a larger user group- collective access had few people using the user forums
Migration
need to be able to further develop taxonomy functionalities before using AtoM
platform agnostic- windows or mac but ran into problems- hung up for about a month
AtoM wound up re-writing documentation to better support
Had little IT support
contracted with outside IT consultant
hosted through Amazon cloud-works well
Doing some in-house development (plugin) through Artefactual
Started with contracted developer in house
documentation is still sometimes misleading, over simplified
have run into number of bugs
timeline has been long
Wound up using Artefactual for development rather than contracted developer
Legacy systems- not all have been migrated (image catalog system is next for migration)
developing mapping system between AtoM and legacy system
70000 images in legacy image catalog system
Have entered som finding aids as data entry (not imported)
End users confused because some data had been entered into AtoM some hadn’t
created stub records for everything in AtoM just so everything would be represented
All data entry (38 collections)
In-house customization vs. sponsorship
minimal customization
confusion about menu labels out of the box in AtoM
Get an overview of collections in a system- page of collections
Renamed first value in browse menu to “collections” to make it clearer
Incorporated user-friendly language in menus
developed some additional help documentation
Have begun two development projects
in-house plug-in (not sponsored)
Sponsored content: enhancement to places taxonomy-
already allowed BT, NT, Use, Use For etc., worked well on admin side
hierarchical data didn’t make it to catalog record and wasn’t being indexed. Users didn’t benefit from hierarchical structure created on admin side