Pocket Archive

What it is

Pocket Archive is a digital archival system and web portal generator for safeguarding at-risk cultural heritage and other digital artifacts in environments with limited freedom of movement, funds, access to technology, and Internet connectivity. It literally fits in a pocket.

Pocket Archive has been designed with the archiving practices of large cultural institutions in mind, and adapted to the benefit of under-funded individuals, organizations, and communities. It enables thorough and detailed cataloging and digital preservation workflows, while requiring very low technical and human resources to set up, run, and use.

What it does

Pocket Archive fulfills the following business functions:

• Storage and management of files and metadata records
• Management of descriptive, administrative, and technical metadata
• Static site generation (presentation) for private or public distribution of small archives
• Integration with larger archival systems and external production workflows

How it started

Several years ago, the author of this project believed that he should work in larger and larger institutions, with larger and larger data sets. One day, he came across a project that changed this perspective.

"From a standpoint of preserving human cultural heritage at large, does it make more sense to design very large repositories for very rich institutions, with a lot of safety layers but also a lot of bureaucracy and redundancy, or rather contribute to many decentralized projects that are highly efficient, small, representing periferal cultures, and most importantly, that are at much higher risk of loss than large institutions'"?

The answer was: both. This software has been conceived with the experience of large-scale repositories as the background to decide what works and what doesn't, what is necessary and what is superfluous, and what catalogers and archivists need to do their job.

Who can benefit from it

Pocket Archive can be part of a first line of defense against cultural erasure and loss. Beyond the basic, necessary step of securing physical artifacts, concepts, documents, etc. by digitizing them and storing them into local hard drives, Pocket Archive provides first-aid tools to organize the digitized contents and describe them in an articulated way, in order to preserve as much information and context on site as possible.

Pocket Archive is by design limited in scale and scope. It is not meant to be used for large archives, or to support complex workflows with many users in a larger organization. It is also not a complete preservation system of its own. It can, however, be deployed in many independent, decentralized archives that feed into a larger archive with proper security and digital preservation strategies, in scenarios where individual contributors are not able to access the central archive directly.

Pocket Archive is also useful in cases where the contents of an archive must be kept private, due to privacy or safety concerns. It can operate entirely offline to eliminate the risks related to running an online application.

What it provides

Some of the more interesting features of Pocket Archive:

• Bulk content creation and updates are done by pushing spreadsheets (CSV) and data packages to a drop box;
• Highly customizable content model with user-definable relationships between resources;
• Multi-language data entry;
• Ability to create logical content structures of arbitrary depth and complexity;
• Ability to run a presentation and search site from a local disk or a thumb drive, without an Internet connection;
• Customizable transformers to generate presentation-quality media from archival master files;
• Fully implementing Linked Data under the hood, hiding its ugly parts from the end user.

Non-technical features

Pocket Archive is simply a technical tool; however it may be useful, it must be part of a broader digital preservation strategy in order to be effective. That includes education, training, communication channels, and eventually, the creation of a community, or integration with an existing one. This is a long-term goal. The digital preservation section is part of this effort to provide high-quality standard practices for prospective Pocket Archive users.

What it enables

While Pocket Archive has self-imposed limits in capacity and scope, it also integrates well with larger systems. It can be used to feed small, individual archives into larger bodies of knowledge, or simply off-site backup copies, with the help of some basic IT expertise.

It is not inconceivable that if many Pocket Archives were to sprout all over the place one day, they could be periodically harvested, linked together, and presented in one large, central archive (it's Linked Data, after all), without any detriment to the independence of the individual archives.

Where it stands

Presently, Pocket Archive is in a Release candidate status. The software is considered feature-complete from a minimum viable product (MVP) standpoint, it has been tested with some sample data, and is now looking for volunteers to put it to work in a real-world scenario before considering it "stable" (i.e., version 1.0.0).

Development, issues, and milestones are tracked in the source code repository.

Further information

Technical documentation

For system administrators, the Test drive page contains step-by-step instructions to set up a full Pocket Archive environment with Docker Compose. Please also explore the installation guide for full-scale setup instructions.

Cataloging and archiving workflows

If you are more inclined to content management and have an instance already set up for you, read the Content modeling guidelines to learn about Pocket Archive's content modeling system and the submission guide to get started with archiving contents.

Other resources

The glossary is a useful reference to some specialized terms used in Pocket Archive and in the digital preservation field.

Contact

For questions about Pocket Archive, please write to info at knowledgetx, etc. (see this website domain). To contribute to the improvement of the project, including reporting bugs or missing features, see the Contributing page.