What is Archivematica?
Archivematica is a free and open-source digital preservation system that is designed to maintain standards-based, long-term access to collections of digital objects.
Archivematica uses a micro-services design pattern to provide an integrated suite of software 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 format policies based on an analysis of the significant characteristics of file formats.
The overview section provides a detailed description of Archivematica's functionality and technical architecture. This Archivematica 0.9-beta screencast gives a demo of the core features in the current release.
Free and open source
Archivematica is free and open source software. Any new software code created for the Archivematica project is released under an AGPL3 license. The source code is available at archivematica.googlecode.com. All the system documentation found on this wiki is released under a Creative Commons license.
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.
Code contributions, bug reports, wiki documentation updates along with questions and feedback in the chat room and discussion list are strongly encouraged and welcomed.
Commercial licenses and commercial use of the Archivematica name and logo trademarks may be negotiated with Artefactual Systems on a case-by-case basis.
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.
About
This project is managed by Artefactual Systems in collaboration with the UNESCO Memory of the World's Subcommittee on Technology, the City of Vancouver Archives, the University of British Columbia Library, the Rockefeller Archive Center, Simon Fraser University Archives and Records Management, and a number of other collaborators.
