About

The Archon Users Collaborative is a community of Archon users. "Archon is award-winning software for archivists and manuscript curators. It automatically publishes archival descriptive information and digital archival objects in a user-friendly website. With Archon, there is no need to encode a finding aid, input a catalog record, or program a stylesheet. Archon's powerful scripts will automatically make everything in the system searchable and browsable on your repository's website!" (archon.org) The University of Illinois had been supporting Archon until 2014. 

In 2017, the Archon Users Collaborative released an updated version of Archon for public use dubbed Archon 3.21-rev3. This update project is the result of a cooperatively funded initiative by Berea College, Carleton College, Denison University, Luther College, Oberlin College, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and Wheaton College in 2016-2017. The revised code was developed under contract with LibraryHost, LLC, and tested by several institutions across the country. This is freely available to the entire Archon user community.

Archon 3.21-rev3 ensures the stability of the Archon core code to be compatible with PHP 5.6. This version of PHP is projected to be supported until January 2019. In addition, Archon 3.21-rev3 includes a web application firewall ModSecurity and partial phrase search capabilities across identifiers and record groups. It is available for download on GitHub (please see the README file for instructions on how to upgrade): https://github.com/archonproject/archon. 

In May 2017, a group of Archon users and interested parties participated in Archon Day, held at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. As a result of discussions relating to the viability and use of Archon at their institutions, the participants adopted the name Archon Users Collaborative to establish an official user group. The Archon Users Collaborative also identified three initiatives to explore during the 2017-2018 year:

1. Conduct a Census of Archon Users to identify current user needs;
2. Develop a method to facilitate discussion among the user community; and
3. Research other open-source software governance models to sustain the Archon tool and user community.

For more information, check the FAQs or contact team leader Sasha Griffin at <griffins@denison.edu>.