Archivists' Toolkit™: Shortening the Path from Accession to Researcher

The Archivists’ Toolkit™ (AT) is an open-source, community-developed application designed by archivists for managing archival collections and for generating a variety of reports and metadata products. This presentation focuses on the life-cycle of a single archives collection demonstrating the following features in the AT application and how the application contributes to a culture of “More Product, Less Processing”:

Features discussed and demonstrated include:

• Accessioning and preliminary description of a collection
• Creating a resource record from the accession record and expanding it to a multi-level description of the collection
• Creating a digital object record from the description of a collection component and expanding it to a multi-level description of the digital object
• Generating an EAD.xml file, PDF and HTML versions of the collection finding aid, and a METS record for the digital object

The slide presentation concludes with a review of the customization features present in the AT for expediting data entry and processing.