Sorry, the Canadiana Digital Collection Builder (DCB) project is no longer active

[peterVG]

The DCB software application was first developed in 2007 as part of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) AloutteCanada initiative. A subsequent merger established the Canadiana organization which took over administrative responsibilities for DCB. In July 2012 Canadiana made the decision to discontinue the DCB project and focus instead on its digital collections management services.

But don't panic, the software lives on...

The DCB software was developed and supported by our Vancouver-based company Artefactual Systems, in collaboration with Canadiana. DCB is a distribution of the Qubit Toolkit, also developed by Artefactual Systems. The Qubit Toolkit is also used to develop the ICA-AtoM distribution for the International Council on Archives (ICA). This means that DCB and ICA-AtoM are identical software applications. The only difference between the two distributions is that each uses a different default theme (DCB: Alouette, ICA-AtoM: Caribou) and default metadata standard (DCB: Dublin Core, ICA-AtoM ISAD(G)). However, upgrading does not change the current settings for theme or metadata standard, so this difference is irrelevant when upgrading. This means there is a simple upgrade path from the last DCB release 1.2 (November 2011) or 1.2.1 patch (June 2012) to the newer ICA-AtoM 1.3 release (August 2012). All local DCB 1.2 theming and configuration settings are compatible with the ICA-AtoM 1.3 release. Therefore, we recommend and hope that all DCB users interested in moving forward with the application will migrate to ICA-AtoM 1.3 and its subsequent releases.

What's next?

The ICA has decided to limit its future ICA-AtoM activities to training for archival institutions with limited resources. As a result, Artefactual has decided to retire the Qubit Toolkit brand and continue ongoing development and support of the exact same codebase as AtoM 2.0 (due early 2013). Artefactual Systems is releasing AtoM under the same AGPLv3 license as its Qubit, ICA-AtoM and DCB predecessors while improving upon its feature set, usability, performance and scalability. This includes a Canadiana Metadata Repository (CMR) export template to enable contributions to Canadiana's Discovery Portal.

Sincerely,

Peter Van Garderen, President

Artefactual Systems Inc.