Collective Access - Providence

CollectiveAccess Providence is a Web-based platform for cataloguing and managing museum, archive, and library collections. It handles everything from descriptive metadata to digital asset storage, supporting complex relationships between objects, authorities, and media. The system is designed for institutions that need flexible, customizable data models without being locked into proprietary tools.

Providence includes a built-in media encoder for handling images, audio, video, and documents, with automated derivative generation and storage. It supports OAI-PMH for metadata harvesting, IIIF for image delivery, and RESTful APIs for integration. The software runs on Linux with Apache or Nginx, using MySQL or MariaDB, and is written in PHP and JavaScript. It is maintained by Whirl-i-Gig, a small company founded by a team with deep museum informatics experience.

This tool is aimed at museums, historical societies, academic libraries, and other memory institutions. It is freely available under an open source license, with optional paid support and hosting from the developers. The project has been in active development since 2010 and is used by hundreds of institutions worldwide.