Considerations for Creating Your Archive

These are the questions we will go through during the collection configuration discussion.  You do not need to know the answers now.   We will talk about the possible options and considerations so that you can make some decisions about your ArchivalWare™setup. 

Documents

  1. What kind of documents are in your collection? (photos, books, etc)
  2. Are you digitizing hard copy?  Are you scanning in bitonal, grayscale or color?  What dpi?  Are you going to OCR the text documents so they will be searchable?  What file formats will you be using?
  3. Are any of your documents currently electronic?  If yes, what file formats?
  4. How many collections do you have?  How many documents will eventually be in each collection?
  5. Will all of your documents be in one library or are some documents restricted from some users?

Metadata

  1. What metadata fields will you use? 
  2. Do you currently have metadata for these documents? 
  3. Will you have documents without metadata or metadata without documents?
  4. Will you use the same fields for all documents or will there be a different set of fields for different types of documents?
  5. Do you want a controlled vocabulary list for any of your metadata fields?

Browse structure (browsing is a way for users to look through your collections via a hierarchical structure without having to know what to search for)  For a good example of browse – go to www.ahco.army.mil

  1. How are your documents organized now?
  2. How do you think your user community would like to look for your documents?
  3. Is there existing metadata that could be used to build the browse structure? 
  4. Would you like more than one way to browse for specific documents?

Users

  1. How many groups will you have?  Groups allow library access, preferences setup and privileges for editing, etc.
  2. How many users within each group?
  3. Who will have access to what libraries and for what purpose?

Technical Issues (this section does not apply to ASP customers)

  1. Number of concurrent users, DB size, Number of documents.
  2. What database will you be using?
  3. Will the application and database be installed on one server?  Will it also be the web server?
  4. What are your organizations security requirements?
  5. Will this be a publicly accessible application?
  6. Provide details regarding any non-standard configurations, i.e.  virtualized OS, multiple database instances.
  7. What type of authentication do you want to use? If you want to use LDAP authentication, we will need additional information.
  8. Sending email from within ArchivalWare. Will you use your own SMTP server? An alternative is to install apache JAMES SMTP.