Artefactual is pleased to announce the launch of a new service offering, the Archivematica Product Support Program.
The Archivematica Product Support Program is a membership-based venue for organisations that are actively engaged in extending or customising Archivematica. The PSP will help members reduce the costs of their Archivematica software development and better manage the associated risks. Members will engage with other developer-users, improve their understanding, and help shape discussions around development practices and the technical architecture of the Archivematica project.
Artefactual is the lead developer of Archivematica and the company acts as the organisational home for the project. Archivematica software is used around the world in a growing number of organisations, in increasingly diverse contexts.
Archivematica is a free and open-source software project. Artefactual encourages potential users to take advantage of the freedoms this allows; to run Archivematica as they wish, to study and change how it works, to redistribute copies with their changes in order to help others. These freedoms have allowed some Archivematica users to develop their own customisations and extensions, adapting Archivematica to their specific needs. This raises important questions for these users about how best to design, sustain, and maintain their versions of the code.
Archivematica software is free, but the time of the staff at Artefactual and other organisations is not. The ability to confer, discuss, plan, and collaborate with the lead developers of an open-source project can greatly reduce the cost of in-house development efforts, and the risk of an organisation needing to maintain a customized fork of the software.
The Archivematica Product Support Program will benefit organisations that are extending or customising Archivematica for local use. Members will describe and coordinate their development plans, with the intention of incorporating their customisations and extensions into general public releases of Archivematica, managed by Artefactual. The program aims to reduce the cost and effort required to contribute code to the Archivematica project, for program members and the entire Archivematica community.
The founding members of the Archivematica Product Support Program are Wellcome Collection, International Institute of Social History, Max Communications, Bodleian Libraries at University of Oxford, and Picturae. The founding members, along with Artefactual, will be working together over the next 6 months to define the Product Support Program, outline objectives for improving development participation in the Archivematica project, and determine methods for sharing their development roadmaps. All artifacts of the Product Support Program will be made openly available online at https://psp.archivematica.org
A general call for new members will go out in July 2020. The annual fee for membership in the program is USD$10,000.
Thank you to the founding members for their dedication and efforts to support the Archivematica project!