What is Archivematica?
Archivematica is a comprehensive digital preservation system. Archivematica uses a micro-services design pattern to provide an integrated suite of free and open-source tools that allows users to process digital objects from ingest to access in compliance with the ISO-OAIS functional model.
Users monitor and control the micro-services via a web-based dashboard. Archivematica uses METS, PREMIS, Dublin Core and other best practice metadata standards. Archivematica implements media type preservation plans based on an analysis of the significant characteristics of file formats.
Archivematica 0.7-alpha Dashboard
The overview section provides a detailed description of Archivematica's functionality and technical architecture. The screencast below gives a demo of the Archivematica 0.7-alpha release (starting at 2m14s)
Free and open source
Archivematica is free and open source software. The software applications integrated into Archivematica are each released under their own open source license. These are checked for license compatibility before they are integrated into the project. A full list of applications with their respective license is available on the external software tools page.
Any new software code created for the Archivematica project is released under a GPL version 2 license. All the system documentation found on this wiki is released under a Creative Commons license.
The source code is available at archivematica.googlecode.com.
Agile development
Digital preservation systems must implement strategies that deal with technology obsolescence and incompatibility to ensure that digital objects remain authentic, accessible and useable for future use. The technologies that create digital objects and the technology available to manage them are constantly changing. Therefore, the Archivematica project has established an agile software development methodology to manage the perpetual maintenance and development of the system. This methodology is focused on rapid, iterative release cycles, each of which improves upon the system's requirements, software, documentation, and development resources.
