Syntactica Solutions for the Digital Archivist
In the past, archivists spent much of their time storing and cataloging paper and other physical artifacts. But since the 1980s many of the most important historical artifacts in our world have moved from the realm of paper to digital-only documents.
Today the digital archivist must not only capture digital artifacts, they must make these historically significant documents available through on-line search and retrieval tools.
And the expectations of users of our archives is growing. Not only do users want simple keyword search but they expect relevant document to appear quickly and they want the most relevant documents to appear first in the result sets.
Although a wide variety of conversion tools, many documents that have been previously being locked in vendor-specific formats can now be easily be converted to standard formats such as XML or TEI that retain document structure. This document structure is critical for retaining high precision and high relevancy search. Within the last several years many these digital documents are being stored in open XML formats.
But many archivists are working with limited budgets and do not have the resources to purchase complex databases and hire full time software developers to create and maintain high-precision document markup systems.
Digital archivists need easy-to use tools that can be customized to their needs without the need for custom software. They need solutions that do not require complex programming languages such as Java, .Net, C# or Python. They want solutions that allow them to drag-and-drop XML files into collections and allow fast but precise retrieval over very large document collections.
The Syntactica XRX application architecture is perfectly suited to these requirements. With the XRX web application architecture you will never need to learn about creating middle tier objects, relational databases or transforming XML to and from these other formats.
Syntactica offer a full range of training, tools and processes to do the most with limited budgets. We focus on open source software systems that can be quickly customized to the needs of the digital archivist. Our solutions make it easy for non-programmers to handle all phase of the document lifecycle:
- importing one or many documents in both XML or non-XML formats
- validation of the authenticity of source documents using checksums and hashs functions
- analysis and reporting on documents using web standards
- export documents in a wide variety of formats
- transformation of documents into timelines, maps and graphical analysis tools
