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[edit] Sorry, the Canadiana Digital Collection Builder (DCB) project is no longer active
The Digital Collection Builder (DCB) was an open-source, web-based software tool designed to manage digital collections online. Its objective was to provide a free tool that made it cheaper and easier to get Canadian digital collections online while improving the standards-compliance of the metadata being generated by digital collections managers.
The tool was first developed in 2007 as part of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) AloutteCanada initiative. A subsequent merger established the Canadiana organization which took over administrative responsibilities for DCB.
The DCB software was developed and supported by the Vancouver-based company Artefactual Systems, in collaboration with Canadiana. In July 2012 Canadiana made the decision to discontinue the DCB project and focus instead on its digital collections management services.
[edit] ...but the software lives on
The DCB software was a distribution of the Qubit Toolkit developed by Artefactual Systems. The Qubit Toolkit was also used to develop the ICA-AtoM distribution for the International Council on Archives (ICA). This means that DCB and ICA-AtoM are identical software applications. The only difference between the two distributions was that each used different default theme (DCB: Alouette, ICA-AtoM: Caribou) and default metadata standard (DCB: Dublin Core, ICA-AtoM ISAD(G)). However, upgrading does not change the current settings for theme or metadata standard, so this difference is irrelevant when upgrading. This means there is a simple upgrade path from the last DCB release 1.2 (November 2011) to the newer ICA-AtoM 1.3 release (August 2012). All local DCB 1.2 theming and configuration settings are compatible with the ICA-AtoM 1.3 release.
[edit] What next?
The ICA has decided to limit its future ICA-AtoM activities to training for archival institutions with limited resources. As a result, Artefactual has decided to retire the Qubit Toolkit brand and continue ongoing development and support of the exact same codebase as AtoM 2.0. Artefactual Systems is releasing AtoM under the same AGPLv3 license as its Qubit, ICA-AtoM and DCB predecessors while improving upon its feature set, usability, performance and scalability. This includes a Canadiana Metadata Repository (CMR) export template to enable contributions to Canadiana's Discovery Portal.
