Pocket Archive
The idea
Stick it in your pocket and carry it around. Install it on a cloud server. Install it on a Raspberry Pi. Browse it offline. Browse it online. Duplicate it, share it, harvest it and aggregate it. Feed it non-GMO spreadsheets regularly and it will thrive.
A more sensical description
Pocket Archive is a digital archival system and static site generator for small- to medium-(?) sized archives. It is designed to function in environments with unreliable connectivity and requires very low technical and human resources to set up, run, and use.
Pocket Archive fulfills the following functions:
- Storage and management of files and metadata-only resources
- Management of descriptive, administrative, and technical metadata
- Dynamic relationships between resources
- Static site generation (discovery interface)
In spite of its design simplicity, Pocket Archive strives to be highly flexible. It is based on Volksdata , a very compact Linked Data store written in C. There is no restriction to the types and schema of metadata allowed, or the file types supported. A file-based configuration allows to set up content types and validation rules, or to have (almost) no rules at all.
Why
Several years ago, the author of this project believed that he should work in larger and larger institutions, with larger and larger data sets. One day, he came across a project that changed his perspective.
"From a standpoint of preserving human cultural heritage at large, does it make more sense to design very large repositories for very rich institutions, with a lot of layers of safety but also a lot of bureaucracy and redundancy, or rather contribute to many decentralized projects that are highly efficient, small, representing periferal cultures, and most importantly, that are at much higher risk of loss than large institutions'"?
The answer was: both. This software has been conceived with the experience of large-scale repositories as the background to decide what works and what doesn't, what is necessary and what is superfluous, and what catalogers and archivists need to do their job.
It is not inconceivable that if many Pocket Archives were to sprout all over the place one day, they could be periodically harvested, linked together, and presented in one large, central archive (it's Linked Data, after all), without any detriment to the indepencence of the individual archives.
Further documentation
Please explore the installation guide for setup instructions or, if you have an instance already set up for you, the Content model introduction to learn about Pocket Archive's content modeling system and the submission guide to get started with archiving contents. The glossary is a useful reference to some specialized terms used in Pocket Archive and in the digital preservation field.
Compatibility
Linux only at the moment. The submission watchdog relies on inotify which is
not portable. Adopters not using the watchdog or willing to re-implement it
may have success with other POSIX environments, but these have not been tested.
Status
ALPHA. Pocket Archive is a very recent project, in fast development. Its foundational library, Volksdata, has been developed as a spare-time project for 6 years and it just entered in beta status.
Road map
See Road map doc.