Exploring archives space: an open source solution for digital archiving

Abstract

The advent of digital and networking technologies has begun to embrace the genesis of the next-generation digital archive. The inclusion of cross-domain objects like manuscript documents, audio and video recordings, photographs, paintings, sculptures and other digitised cultural heritage materials increases the complexity of digital archiving in terms of preservation, collection, and discovery of these resources. Introducing a high definition information retrieval system to exhibit the library and museum’s digital resources to a maximum number of users in an open-access environment can satisfy the S. R. Ranganathan’s fourth law – save the time of reader as well as the staffs. Nevertheless, from the perspective of acquiring an advanced OPAC view (web-scale discovery interface) with index-based searching, metadata harvesting, and accessing the physical as well as digital holdings is always a better option for Archival Collections Management System (ACMS). This paper illustrates the fundamental notions and applications of ArchivesSpace, a useful open-source digital archiving toolkit of the contemporary world and analyses its relevance in digital language archiving.