Publish vs Draft

[Daniela Moneta]

I am an archivist, not an IT person so this question may be very basic. It is about the Internet and visibility of our collection. We are a small non-profit organization with 5 archives around the world run by volunteers. We have not established archives facilities yet and do not have a public website. AtoM is a perfect database for us and works very well for our needs. We are just starting to catalog our collections on AtoM and are testing it on Amazon Free Tier for one year. Sometime in the future we plan to have our database password protected and available to members of our organization. At this time, we don't want our database on the Internet and available to the public or members mainly because we do not have staff to deal with reference questions and we haven't yet worked out security issues. Our priority is to catalog only.

 

We are cataloging our records in Draft mode so they are not visible to anyone except authorized staff. Another issue is that some of our documents are private or confidential. We had planned to use the Draft mode for the confidential documents and have a special user group that could view them but not the membership or the public. 

 

Now everything is Draft. If we change the non-confidential documents to Publish, will they be searchable and viewable on the Internet? We don't have a public website but does that keep our collection private? Can people search (on Google or another search engine) on a name, a subject, or an author and see our cataloging records if we catalog them as Published?

 

Thanks for your advice,

 

Daniela

[Dan Gillean]

Hi Daniela,

Good questions!

AtoM is designed to be an all-in-one description and access platform. If your website is accessible to the public from a URL - if I can enter an address into my browser and get there - then putting your records in published mode will make them visible to public users. However, if you have some other system in place to prevent the entire site from being publicly accessible - for example, adding HTTP authentication to the entire website - then webcrawlers from Google and other search engines will be unable to access the site - meaning it will not be indexed, and public users won't be able to see the records.

At this time, other entities in AtoM (such as authority records, term taxonomies such as subjects and places, and repository records) do not have a publication status - they cannot be marked as draft. This means that as soon as your website is publicly accessible, all the records from these entity types will be publicly discoverable. You can change access to the view pages of these records via the permissions module - denying view authority record permissions for the anoymous group, for example - and in that case, users will be able to browse the results page, but not click on any authority record to see the full view page, unless they are logged in. Draft mode on archival descrptions behaves differently - if a record is in draft, it will not show up even in search and browse for anonymous (ie public) users.

So the short answer is: if you want to keep all records, including the non-confidential published descriptions and other entity types, from being indexed and discoverable on the internet, then you'll want to keep your site password protected.

Note that if you are interested in only restricting access to the digital objects linked to a description (because of copyright concerns, donor agreements, etc), but the description itself can be public, you could use the actionable PREMIS rights module - see:

• https://www.accesstomemory.org/docs/2.2/user-manual/add-edit-content/rights/

This module is also being significantly improved in the upcoming 2.3 release:

• https://www.accesstomemory.org/docs/2.3/user-manual/add-edit-content/rights/
  

I also wanted to mention another feature that will be available in the upcoming 2.3 release, for when you ARE ready to make your records discoverable by search engines such as Google. There will be a new command-line task in 2.3 that will allow you to generate an XML sitemap, for better search engine optimization (SEO). You can define the weight of different levels of descriptions (e.g. so a fonds or collection will be given more weight when a search engine's bots crawl your sites) via a configruation file. You can also use the --ping option on the command to inform Google and Bing of your sitemap when it's ready. For more information, see:

• https://www.accesstomemory.org/docs/2.3/admin-manual/maintenance/cli-tools/#generate-an-xml-sitemap-for-search-engine-optimization

Regards,

Dan Gillean, MAS, MLIS
AtoM Program Manager
Artefactual Systems, Inc.
604-527-2056

@accesstomemory

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