Two of the crew from Artefactual Systems, the boss himself Peter van Garderen and systems archivist/analyst and consultant Evelyn McLellan, along with AABC education coordinator Kelly Stewart, presented a great workshop around ICA-AtoM, the open source archival description tool under development by Peter's company for the International Council on Archives.
The Archives Association of British Columbia adopted ICA-AtoM as a replacement for the existing process and computing infrastructure around the British Columbia Archival Union List or BCAUL (B-Call). Come November 02009 when it will be officially launched, BCAUL will be rebranded as MemoryBC. Workshop participants got a taste of the current iteration of ICA-AtoM through a LiveCD version in the UBC SLAIS computer lab. I volunteered my services as someone familiar with ICA-AtoM to assist the participants. Peter introduced me as a "power user."
I think most everyone was very excited by the application and had many questions and useful suggestions for Peter. One of the big questions, which I asked, is whether ICA-AtoM will evolve into a full-fledged archival management system and Peter gave an affirmative answer to that.
Artefactual Systems is also now offering Web hosting of ICA-AtoM for institutions at $125/month, a very reasonable cost considering you're getting a phenomenal 100GB of storage for any digital objects you attach to item-level records.
Peter also reported on the workshop on the ICA-AtoM discussion group on Google Groups.
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