INDI team members have been busy over the summer working on the data model and workflow for the Arrangement and Description Module as well as testing the Accession module.

The Accession Module of INDI was released in a limited fashion to several students and curators in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections in July 2007. These students and curators used INDI to accession new collections and provided feedback on INDI’s usability. They recommended that contextual help be implemented as soon as practical and the project team began drafting the text for this help to be added to the Accession module. The Accession module of INDI was released to all of the manuscript curators and their students in early August and use of the system has been consistent and very few problems have been reported.

Team members carefully analyzed Describing Archives: A Content Standard, the EAD Schema, Dublin Core and several other national standards in the construction of the data model that will underly the Arrangement and Description Module. They also carefully analyzed the manuscripts Workflow in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections and created a workflow diagram to aid in the creation of the forms that will gather the arrangement and description data. Team members are working to understand the arrangement and description practices of the Wilson Folklore Archives in order to meet the unique descriptive needs of folklore materials through the INDI system.

This week the project team has been creating a webcast to highlight the completed portions of INDI. It can be viewed on the Downloads page of this site under Screencasts.

As you may have noticed, this site is under development. We’ll let you know when it’s polished and ready to be unveiled. :)

During our recent meeting, it was decided that we would work to redevelop our Web site to act as a clearing house for information about the INDI Project.

Over the past few months we have received a number of inquiries about the project from other institutions. These include archivists interested in how the system compares to other archival management applications (such as Archon or Archivists Toolkit), programmers interested in the technological underpinnings of the system, and archival administrators interested in the benefits of workflow management in archival processing. In the past we have created various documents to meet the needs of these groups, but we believe that it would be more effective to develop a single site that might meet the needs of these various audiences.

By developing this site, we also hope to generate more interest in the archival community in our developing product. Over the past year there have been a number of other products made available to archivists to help manage their work. While these offer workable solutions for some institutions, we believe that INDI’s focus on workflow management and collaboration sets it apart from its competitors and makes an important contribution to the archival community.

We hope that readers will be able to track our progress on the project, as we move toward our release date.