Just a note to record that we have now almost completed a project to purchase Axiell Calm as the University of Lincoln Library’s new archives & special collections management software.
Calm is the leading archives system in the UK, is widely used by public archives and museums as well as by universities, and is compliant with the acronym soup of standards in archive management (EAD; ISAD (G); ISAAR (CPF); NCA, anybody?) We’ve also bought into CalmView, which will provide a decent public web front-end to our special collections.
What special collections? Well, there’s the Pilger Archive for starters. Other potential collections at the University (including the Lincolnshire Echo archives and the diaries of Fu Bingchang) haven’t been developed because the Library needed first to develop an infrastructure and expertise in dealing with special collections, but found it hard to do so without a special collection to justify investment: a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation! – hence the purchase of Calm.
Lincolnshire County Council already use Calm to manage the county archives, and have a significant amount of expertise with it. I hope that through our contacts with the county library & archives service (via LISN and elsewhere), we’ll be able to share in their expertise and, potentially, collaborate on future archival projects.
And because Calm provides an OAI-PMH endpoint, we’ll be able to suck our special collections straight into Jerome, just as we’ve already done with our Repository via the same protocol.
