Collective
Access is open-source software developed to meet the specific needs of heritage organizations: museums, archives, academic institutions, foundations, and libraries. It takes an integral approach to collection management, which can be divided into three processes:
With more than a decade of history and a consolidated position in its niche, Collective Access is used by hundreds of organizations in the United States, Canada, and Europe.
Since 2018, with the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires as our partner, at Bibliohack we began exploring Collective Access as a platform for managing and publishing collections. This experience has given us in-depth knowledge of its possibilities and scope, working with leading institutions in the region.
We now bring this knowledge to new projects, helping adapt Collective Access to the particular needs of each collection and organization. We provide consulting, training, installation, configuration, and design. Contact us to learn more about our services.
Heritage institutions need a robust, ubiquitous digital platform to describe and manage their collections, especially large, heterogeneous collections in the hands of cross-functional professional teams. Collective Access integrates into the fabric of an organization in decisive ways.
Collective Access was specifically developed to meet complex requirements in collection description. It integrates a wide range of standardized metadata schemas, with the ability to model them to fit, maintaining professional standards in archival and cataloging practice. It also provides powerful tools for data import, mapping, and structuring.
The back-end application of Collective Access is designed for integral management of the collection. It handles, for example, records of acquisitions, loans, movements, geolocation, traceability, e-commerce, conservation status, cataloging status, and incident logging. It includes tools for reporting and for exporting data in multiple formats.
All back-end resources can be accessed from any device connected to the internet or to a corporate intranet. It features an advanced system of granular permissions, access, and roles, plus tools for composing administration interfaces. This makes it possible to integrate a team of collaborators with different roles and responsibilities, streamlining workflow and organization across a dispersed geography.
Providing digital access to collections is an unavoidable responsibility for institutions whose central mission is to make their holdings universally available. Understanding and analyzing the trends, uses, and codes that users bring from their digital experiences is fundamental to publishing a site with impact and visibility on the web.
Collective Access includes a front-end application for publishing the collection — in whole or in part — on the internet, independent of the management back-end. This modular structure, combined with an open architecture extensible through plugins and graphic themes, provides the flexibility needed to focus on visual quality, usability, and the design of the user experience.
The front-end provides advanced means of content discovery: faceted navigation, tag filtering, custom searches, and user-configurable display options. It also offers 2.0 participatory tools: tagging, content rating, custom sets, and comments, among others.
Collective Access has emphasized, from the beginning, the integration of multimedia formats and technologies, central to managing collections of digital objects. It provides audio and video transcoding, interactive exploration of high-resolution images, multimedia annotation, support for the IIIF standard, and 3D model visualization.
Closed or proprietary licenses tie a software product to a single vendor and prevent modification of the source code without its authorization.
By contrast, free and open source licenses allow institutions to choose among different vendors (or hire their own developers) to configure, adapt, or use the software according to their needs.
Free software thus avoids excessive dependence on a single contractor. And because the source code is accessible, the process gains transparency and auditability.
All of this matters even more in the public sector, where it makes it possible to extend the public nature of infrastructure to the field of software and to sustain its maintenance over the long term.
In this webinar (in Spanish) we share experiences using Collective Access for collection management and the design of digital catalogs in Argentina.
At Bibliohack we provide consulting, training, installation, configuration, and design for Collective Access. Contact us to learn more about our services.