About the ICA-AtoM Project

  1. Project Purpose
  2. Project Values
  3. Governance Model
  4. Software License
  5. Trademark
  6. Project Funding

A. Project Purpose

The purpose of the ICA-AtoM Project is to provide free and open-source software:

  1. that enables institutions to make their archival holdings available online, especially those who could not otherwise afford to do so
  2. that manages archival descriptions in accord with ICA standards
  3. that provides multi-lingual interfaces and content translation features
  4. that supports multiple collection types
  5. that is fully web-based, user-friendly and follows accessibility best practices
  6. that is flexible and customizable
  7. that is useful to both small and large institutions alike
  8. that supports single or multi-repository implementations

B. Project Values

The values of the ICA-AtoM Project are to conduct its affairs in the spirit of open-source collaboration, including:

  1. openly sharing technical expertise
  2. promoting professional best practices
  3. nurturing an active community of users and developers
  4. leveraging existing open web technology to deliver best-of-breed archives software
  5. providing solutions to organizations with limited financial and technical resources
  6. engaging active participation from organizations that have the necessary financial and technical resources
  7. providing a common ground for cross-discipline collaboration with related communities
  8. generating revenue to support ICA-AtoM and other ICA activities through a business model that benefits from widespread ICA-AtoM adoption

C. Governance Model

Users and developers of ICA-AtoM sofware are free to use it as they see fit under the open terms of the AGPL-3 license. However, the formal objectives and activities of the ICA-AtoM Project will be established by the ICA-AtoM Steering Committee. The ICA-AtoM Steering Committee reports regularly to the ICA Executive Board.

Members of the ICA-AtoM Steering Committee include:

As the ICA Secretrary-General and chair of the ICA-AtoM Steering Committee, David Leitch provides executive direction for the project while Artefactual Systems is the primary contractor, managing the day-to-day software development and user community support. Rob Mildren is the technical liaison between the ICA-AtoM Steering Committee and Artefactual Systems.

D. Software License

The ICA-AtoM software is released under the AGPL-3 license. It consists of a number of AGPL-3 compatible libraries, predominately the Qubit Toolkit and the symfony web application framework. Due to the large number of contributors from these and other software libraries, it is not possible to assign copyright to a single person or organization. Therefore, copyright of all the software code used within ICA-AtoM remains with the original authors.

However, all the code used in the ICA-AtoM software is strictly verified for compliance with the AGPL-3 license, thereby making the entire distribution freely useable to any and all parties under the terms of the AGPL-3 license. This includes the ability to make changes to the source code and to redistribute free versions of the software. One can also charge a fee for copying, modifying and redistributing the software and any other related services as long as the software code itself and any modifications or derivative works created from it remain free and publicly accessible under the same AGPL-3 license.

F. Project Funding

Different phases of the software development have been funded thus far by financial contributions from: