Heritage & cultural organisations
An archive, catalogue and search system that your organisation owns outright, on open-source software, with maintenance you can stop at any time.
This is for archives, literary and historical societies, museums and archaeology units, in Ireland and elsewhere. The work is delivered remotely, so it doesn’t matter where you are.
The problem
Many heritage organisations look after collections that matter far more than their budgets suggest. They often have no IT staff at all, and the systems they have grew up piece by piece: spreadsheets, shared drives, an old database nobody quite understands.
When it’s time to do something better, the usual options are expensive subscription platforms. They can work well, but the organisation doesn’t control them. Prices rise, features change, and getting your catalogue back out in a usable form can be hard. A collection meant to last centuries ends up depending on a contract renewed every year.
The offer
A defined package, not a bespoke project:
- Owned system
- Optional local AI
- Your hardware or co-hosted
- Remote maintenance
- An archive, catalogue and search system built on established open-source collections software, chosen to suit the collection. Records are kept in open, documented formats.
- Optional local AI for transcribing handwriting and recordings, suggesting tags, and searching by meaning as well as keywords. It runs on your own machine, so your material isn’t sent to an outside AI service.
- Installed on your own hardware, or co-hosted if you’d rather not keep a machine on site.
- A remote maintenance subscription covering updates, backups, monitoring and fixes, plus help when you need it.
What you own
Everything: the data, the software, the configuration and the documentation. The subscription pays for maintenance, never for access. If you stop it, the system keeps working and is documented well enough for someone else to take over. See our principles on ownership.
Why provenance matters here
Collections are evidence. As AI makes convincing fake documents, images and recordings easy to produce, being able to show that a record is what it claims to be becomes part of looking after it. We are working on verifiable provenance for exactly this reason.
An example of the approach
Colophon is a point-of-sale system we built for a small volunteer-run bookshop. It’s a different kind of system, but the same approach: open source, running on equipment the shop already had, no subscription, and designed so the people who use it can recover it.