Differences between AtoM and ICA AtoM

[Aymará Pais]

Hi! My name is Aymará. We´re using AtoM for our photographic fonds but another office in the same institution installed ICA AtoM. What we´d like to know is if  AtoM is an actualized version of ICA AtoM and in that case what are the differences between these two bases, specially if there are things that we cannot do with ICA-Atom but it´s possible with AtoM.

Thanks for your answers!!

Aymará

[Dan Gillean]

Hello Aymará,

Thanks for posting in the User Forum.

We hope to better clarify this situation in the near future on our websites and in our documentation, so I apologize for any confusion in the meantime.

AtoM is the successor to ICA-AtoM. It is created and maintained by the same developers, and released under the same open-source license. We continue to maintain the same focus on standards-based description and access. The original application (ICA-AtoM) was developed with sponsorship from the International Council on Archives (ICA) up to the 1.2 version. Artefactual continued to maintain and develop that original branch of the application up until the 1.3.1 release, at which time we found that the search index we were using was encountering many performance and scalability issues.

With support from the Canadian Council on Archives, we began developing AtoM 2 - essentially the same application but with the old search index (which used Zend Lucene) replaced with a more performant and scalable one (Elasticsearch). We also developed a new base theme, a few new features, and took this 2.0 opportunity to rebrand the application as simply "AtoM". Otherwise, for the most part all the underlying code in ICA-AtoM 1.3.1 and AtoM 2.0.0 was the same.

You can see some more information about this in the original AtoM 2.0.0 release announcement, made in the User Forum. It also includes a summary of some of the new features that were included in the 2.0.0 release:

• https://groups.google.com/d/msg/ica-atom-users/_zgOnNxM1mE/ODGTv_Bxox4J
  

The intent has always been to focus our development efforts on moving forward with AtoM 2. We had originally hoped to prepare a final ICA-AtoM 1.4 release for the community, but as a small company who takes on the release process, the documentation, the support, the testing, and much of the bug-fixing development for free, we found ourselves unable to manage, package, test and release two separate branches without community sponsorship. We did release an ICA-AtoM 1.3.2 security patch earlier this year, but at this point we have no further plans to develop the ICA-AtoM branch. We strongly encourage all ICA-AtoM users to consider upgrading to AtoM 2.

Meanwhile, development has continued on the AtoM 2 side of things, so there are now many features found in AtoM that you will not find in ICA-AtoM. You can get a sense of what some of these features are by looking at the major release announcements:

• AtoM 2.1 release announcement: https://wiki.accesstomemory.org/Releases/Release_announcements/Release_2.1
• AtoM 2.2 release announcement: https://wiki.accesstomemory.org/Releases/Release_announcements/Release_2.2

AtoM 2's documentation was also completely rewritten, and has been vastly improved over the old ICA-AtoM documentation. You can find the AtoM documentation for the current 2.2 release here:

• https://www.accesstomemory.org/docs/2.2/

We are no longer actively maintaining the older ICA-AtoM documentation, but you will find it here: https://wiki.ica-atom.org/Main_Page

Also, we have recently started offering free webinars, and making the recordings of these available to our community via YouTube. These videos will give you a good sense of how AtoM 2 is different (and how it is the same), if you are familiar with ICA-AtoM. We have an introduction to AtoM recording, and a sneak peek of the new features included in the 2.2 release:

• AtoM introductory webinar: https://youtu.be/kkPYSuSK77k
  
• AtoM 2.2 sneak peek webinar: https://youtu.be/WBBeECajcC8
  

We are already hard at work on the AtoM 2.3 release, which should be available in late 2015. You can look at the roadmap we've created on our new AtoM wiki to get a sense of what features you can expect in the 2.3 release:

• https://wiki.accesstomemory.org/Releases/Roadmap

Finally, part of the reason that the relationship between the two applications is not currently made clear on both the AtoM and ICA-AtoM website has to do with our relationship with the ICA, which became uncertain after the ICA-AtoM 1.2 release. I am pleased to say that we are currently involved in high-level discussions with the ICA about the nature and future of this relationship, and hope to have more information to share with the community about this in the near future. Until then, Artefactual will continue to keep the ICA-AtoM website, documentation, application, and user forum support available - though as I mentioned, we are not actively developing or maintaining these legacy projects, and we strongly encourage new users to consider AtoM 2, and old users to upgrade their current installations following our upgrade instructions.

Kind regards,

Dan Gillean, MAS, MLIS
AtoM Product Manager / Systems Analyst,
Artefactual Systems, Inc.
604-527-2056

@accesstomemory

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