Market overview

The market for archive and museum systems is not as well developed as that for library management systems. In general, compared to libraries, UK archives spend far less on their systems and this has not made it an attractive market for large, international vendors. This has therefore prevented the investment and development resources required to develop software systems.

The UK market is fragmented and served by a number of mostly small vendors that have developed solutions to serve small organisations rather than national, state or major HE institutions. The weakness of the commercial market means that open-source systems have been developed which are supported by archive (often membership) communities with commercial companies providing implementation, development and support services.

The main open source archive systems used in UK HE are ArchiveSpace and AtoM.

ArchivesSpace

ArchivesSpace is supported by the community membership organisation Lyrasis “Lyrasis an active participant in the governance, community and sustainability of ArchivesSpace and remains the organisational home for the ArchivesSpace program”. The commercial provider Atlas also provides support for ArchivesSpace.

AtoM

AtoM (Access to Memory) was initially developed by Artefactual along with the digital preservation system Archivematica and provides hosting support and development services. The AtoM Foundation is a non-profit organisation established in 2018 to oversee and support the development, sustainability and adoption of AtoM

Axiell

In terms of commercial proprietary solutions, Axiell is the primary vendor with hundreds of customers covering museums, galleries and archives. Its primary archive offering has been CALM. This is a functional solution but is dated, especially in technology terms. Axiell has a programme to migrate CALM customers to their new ‘Collections’ solution.