Providence is CollectiveAccess's open-source cataloging software for museums and archives. See its features, licensing, and who maintains it.
CollectiveAccess is free, open-source collections management software that began in 2003 to address the lack of affordable, non-commercial cataloging options for museums and archives. It is maintained by Whirl-i-Gig, a small development and consulting company based in Brooklyn, New York, with community contributions.
The suite has two parts: Providence, the configurable back-end cataloging system institutions use to describe and manage their holdings, and Pawtucket2, the companion front-end for publishing collections online for public browsing and search.
Providence supports a wide range of metadata standards and content types, including documents, images, audio, video, and 3D objects, with web-based cataloging, batch import/export, and customizable data models that don't require custom programming for most configuration.
It runs on a PHP/MySQL stack (current builds support PHP 8.2/8.3), is released under the GPLv3 open-source license, and is used by hundreds of institutions worldwide, from national museums to small local archives.
The software itself is entirely free to download, install, and use under the GPLv3 license, with no subscription fee. Institutions cover their own hosting and staff time, or optionally contract Whirl-i-Gig for custom development, data migration, hosting, or public-website services.
Because pricing for professional services is scoped per project rather than published as fixed tiers, there is no standard public price list beyond the software being free.
Yes. CollectiveAccess, including its Providence cataloging component, is free, open-source software released under the GPLv3 license.
It's maintained by Whirl-i-Gig, a software and consulting company based in Brooklyn, New York, with contributions from the open-source community.
Providence is the back-end cataloging application institutions use to manage collection records; Pawtucket2 is the companion front-end for publishing those collections publicly online.
It runs on a PHP and MySQL stack; current releases support PHP 8.2 and 8.3.
Hundreds of institutions, including national museums, local history consortia, and specialized archives, such as the Kress Digital Archive at the National Gallery of Art and Chicago Film Archives.