Egaia: Ethnographic archives toolkit

Egaia provides a set of command-line archival management tools designed to help professional anthropologists and other field researchers with the management of ethnographic records. The toolkit is designed to be usable in the field – it will let you tag, organize, analyse, and export living collections of ethnographic records without an Internet connection, and without access to a database or to a full set of records.

The toolkit is built as a set of text-based utilities that can be used from the command line, as automated cron jobs, or in shell scripts. The default toolset will help you to generate collections of digital objects in BagIt archival packaging format, accompanied by spreadsheets containing Dublin Core metadata for each item. Preservation (archival) and distribution copies of items are also produced using external tools. Egaia also provides tools for creating a public catalogue and keyword indexes in html format for online publication, as well as for writing digital essays or exhibits that embed ethnographic items.

Documentation for egaia is available online at http://mcdrc.org/egaia/html/ or in the “docs” directory of the source code.

This program is authored by Eric D Thrift and is copyright the Culture and Development Research Centre.

Egaia is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Egaia is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

Main features

  • Supports the BagIt format for file input, storage, and export
  • Supports Dublin Core metadata
  • Converts archived items to distribution formats
  • Allows items within archived collections to be rearranged arbitrarily
  • Enables bulk editing of item metadata in a spreadsheet, or individually in word processor documents (docx format)
  • Creates video finding aids (contact sheets)
  • Creates static HTML catalogues and exhibits for online or offline distribution
  • Supports distributed storage
  • Can be used offline
  • Leaves archived files accessible on the filesystem
  • Can be automated through scripting
  • Open source
  • Works on Linux, Windows, OSX, etc.

This documentation was generated on Mar 19, 2018 for egaia v2.dev225.