ARCHON, Archivists’ Toolkit, or ICA AtoM?
May 29, 2007
The Kansas State Historical Society (http://www.kshs.org) is currently evaluating the relative usefulness and capabilities of three open source archives management software applications:
ARCHON – http://www.archon.org/
Archivists’ Toolkit – http://www.archiviststoolkit.org/
ICA AtoM – http://archivemati.ca/category/ica-atom/
If you have any experience with any of these packages, or can suggest special evaluation criteria we should apply, please let us know by either adding your comment(s) here or emailing Kate Rogge at krogge@kshs.org.
We’ll post our evaluation results (and any significant discoveries along the way) on this blog.
Kansas Archives 
May 31, 2007 at 4:12 pm
We’ve been using Archon for a couple of months (at Mennonite Library and Archives, Bethel College, North Newton, Kansas). mla.bethelks.edu/archon
I’ve been focusing so far on entering rudimentary data on personal papers that were otherwise without effective finding aids, so what has been entered in our database so far is fairly basic and limited.
I’ve been pretty pleased with Archon; it’s easy to use and fairly straightforward.
I chose to use Archon because it was specificly intended to provide a public web interface. I see the lack of such an interface as a huge negative for the Archivists Toolkit. The Toolkit seems to be designed to facilitate creation of EAD documents, and then you still have to have some way of presenting them to the public. What were they thinking??
Obviously I wouldn’t have chosen to use something that didn’t at least claim the ability to produce EAD and MARC records, which Archon does.
I’m not familiar with the importing capabilities of either Archon or the Toolkit.
Also, I had never heard of ICA AtoM before seeing this message.