Parallel Archive

A short definition

Parallel Archive (http://www.parallelarchive.org) is an open source Web 2.0 content storage and creation tool that allows scholars in the humanities and social sciences to manage, share, and preserve their primary source archival documents. Our tool, currently in prototype development, is intended to complement and extend current research practices by addressing three critical needs of our target audience, a) the lack of effective online management tools for primary source archival documents, b) the lack of easy or transparent public access to many archives, and c) the lack of community collaboration tools that also link researchers with archives.

PA functions as:

• A personal workspace: enabling researchers to store, organize, and edit digitized archival documents thanks to a wide range of features, including a cascading file structure, text versions produced with OCR software, a page annotation tool, downloadable double-layered (i.e searchable) PDFs, permanent URLs for direct links to individual documents, etc.
• A collaborative environment: fostering cooperation between scholars thanks to networking functionalities, such as forums, comments, tagging, etc.
• A repository: allowing scholars to make public their digitized copies of material from archives, to find documents uploaded by others, and to locate physical collections of interest throughout the world.