Collective Access - Providence

About CollectiveAccess

CollectiveAccess is collections management and presentation software maintained by Whirl-i-Gig and contributed to by the open-source community. The CollectiveAccess project began in 2003 as a response to the lack of non-commercial, affordable, open-source solutions for digital collections management. Almost two decades later, CollectiveAccess has projects on 5 continents, providing hundreds of institutions with configurable, up-to-date collections management software.

A web-based suite of applications providing a framework for management, description, and discovery of complex digital and physical collections in museum, archival, and research contexts, CollectiveAccess consists of two applications: Providence and Pawtucket2. Providence, the “back-end” cataloging component of CollectiveAccess, is highly configurable and can support a variety of metadata standards, data types, and media formats, including document, images, audio, video and 3d. Pawtucket2 is CollectiveAccess' general purpose public-access publishing tool, enabling creation of interactive web sites around data managed with Providence. (You can learn more about Pawtucket2 at https://github.com/collectiveaccess/pawtucket2)

CollectiveAccess is freely available under the open source GNU Public License version 3, meaning that it is free to download, use and share without licensing restrictions.

About CollectiveAccess 2.0

This version of CollectiveAccess is compatible with PHP versions 8.2 and 8.3. We are currently testing compatibility with PHP 8.4, but it should be usable with that version as well. It can be made to work with PHP versions as old as 7.4 if need be, but it is unsupported when used with pre 8.2 versions of PHP.

What's New

It has been a while since the previous version, 1.7, was released. CollectiveAccess version 2.0 offers a wide range of new and improved features and functionality, including:

• New, more flexible system for tracking changes, such as location history or provenance, over time.
• Improvements to search indexing and built-in search engine to better support hierarchical indexing, text searches including punctuation and non-roman characters, searches on complex accession numbers and more.
• Improved background processing system. Media processing and search indexing background tasks are now more launched more reliably as needed rather than relying on externally configured cron tasks.
• Reporting enhancements, including support for interactive user-provided reporting parameters and background processing of large exports.
• External export system to facilitate integration with digital preservation systems via configurable export of BagIT packages.
• New metadata element data types for file size values and references to media from YouTube, Vimeo, GoogleDocs, Internet Archive and other external services.
• Support for automated translation of profile text (field names, user interface, etc.)