What is GetArchive?

group_work GetArchive is a cross-device cloud, web and mobile platform for managing and sharing media archives and digital collections of any size. GetArchive’s platform is designed for libraries, archives, museums, collectors, so they can store, organize and handle all types of human expressions, including texts, images, books, audio and video recordings, and distribute their content, connect with members, sponsors, and the public.

Why should we put our archive collections online?

record_voice_over Well, how do people find your archive’s unique value? In many cases, your organization’s most valuable assets are unique special collections and archives. While these resources exist in their physical form, they are only available to your local patrons. Only the dedicated researchers will discover and access them.

online_collections

We at GetArchive provide organizations with tools to make their collections discoverable and searchable online. Our platform makes it possible to reach web and mobile users. GetArchive delivers organization’s message directly to web and mobile users, broadcasts an organization’s agenda to a much broader audience, both geographically and socially, through search engines and social network connections.

GetArchive helps to connect and engage with those who are interested in what organizations do, to promote interaction between organizations, potential patrons, and sponsors, to establish new revenue channels. GetArchive tools are designed to help organizations reach their targeted audiences and keep in touch with existing members and sponsors, create and nurture communities.

Our collections are online already, why should we consider GetArchive?

thumbs_up_down You may need GetArchive, and maybe not. To figure this out, open your online collections on desktop, or even better, on a mobile device, and try to answer just a few questions:

experience
  • Are you on your own organizations website? (Not on a third party resource such as Flickr, Europeana, Google Culture Institute, etc.) 
  • Is your current solution a good fit if you publish a significant part of your physical collections? (Most online solutions fail 10,000+ objects collections. )
  • Does it look mobile–friendly? (If it is not, you are losing 60% of web traffic and growing.)
  • Is your current solution capable of handling media types such as images, videos, book formats, or sound recordings?
  • Can you click a social sharing button to share or like? Think you don’t need it? Try to copy your current URL on mobile. And don’t be surprised if it fails to open a correct object even when you paste on a desktop.
  • Search bar anywhere? How fast is the search? It should not  take more than a second to pull up or to zoom an object. Btw, how zoom goes?
  • Try to paste your current URL on Twitter or Facebook. Do you see the correct title, description, and a thumbnail of the object added automatically making your post nice?
  • Can you post a comment, start discussions about a particular object on your page?
  • Do you see something like “explore more like this” or your screen is a dead end?
  • We have more. But OK, it’s enough for a start.

If you answer “NO” on any of the questions above, you already know that it could be much more fun to dig, research, and share your archive collections. 

What GetArchive offers?

card_giftcard GetArchive provides the archive-in-the-cloud, digital collections management software, tools for bringing a broad range of media online and to mobile. Various media files such as digitized images, scanned books, manuscripts, sound and video recordings can be accessed through a variety of methods, including:

GetArchive is continually improving all the elements of the platform and working on adding more great features such as non-profit-tailored mobile and web push notification and donation tools.

How do I start?

help_outline Contact us, get a free account for public domain or choose your payment plan for copyrighted media collections. Assign a person who will be your account administrator and who will be adding collaborators to your account. Receive an activation email from us.

Activate your account, log in to your archive-in-the-cloud account at GetArchive.net and start uploading your files. Our digital collections management user interface requires no software licensing, it is intuitive and easy to use. It is as simple as managing your personal profile on the most popular social networks you probably use on a daily basis.

Do we have to replace our existing online solution with GetArchvive?

pan_tool No. Large archives were not born yesterday. From a professional librarian point of view, the GetArchive solution is missing important features such as multiple search and retrieval features, complex syntax, professional metadata visualization, automatic mapping, complex objects consulting, to name a few. GetArchive it not designed as a replacement for the research librarian software that takes care of the things like that. GetArchive is a tool to get popular, gain new visitors, shares, likes, increase your sponsorship base, and to sell digital copies or prints online if you wish.

If you are not a research library and your current archive online representation is not backed by a top specialized archive software vendor then, chances are, GetArchvie is exactly what you need. Since it requires no coding or web design, your website integration or migration can’t be smoother.

How to upload my files and metadata?

cloud_upload GetArchive provides a platform to host large archives in the specialized cloud and tools for organizing media collections. The standard method to import existing META for images is to include META within image EXIF. Exif data is a standard metadata embedded within images, such as camera setting used when taking photographs, date, and location. When you upload images with EXIF information, META data will be imported automatically. If you are not sure what the best way to migrate your existing archive is, then we can help.

How to edit META data?

code You can edit META data for a single object or use mass actions to change metadata for batches of objects.

Why should we create collections?

collections Creating and sharing collections through various web and social networks channels is the best way to connect with your target audience. Keep your connections engaged, create collections that are relevant to your organization goals and start communicating with those who care about your causes.

How to organize my collections?

collections_bookmark You can create collections, and use mass actions to change tags, descriptions, dates, locations and more, for batches of objects.
GetArchive digital collection management software is user-friendly and allows batch actions, such as mass editing, tagging and geo-tagging. Use mass actions to create or change descriptions and other metadata for batches of images. There are no special “batch processing commands”, command line prompts. No IT background is necessary. It works similar to popular social apps you probably use on a daily basis.

Our archive is very big, comprising millions of objects. Can GetArchive software handle it?

archive Yes. To demonstrate how good we are in handling large archives, we created PICRYL.com and mobile applications that instantly search millions of records and retrieve hundreds of objects in seconds to desktop and to mobile.

We use digital archive solution from other vendors. Can we copy our files and metadata to GetArchive?

forward Most vendors allow project export, objects export (with metadata) and full archive export. Provide us with your export files and we will take care of the rest.

How many people can collaborate within my account?

supervisor_account You may invite as many collaborators as you need. There can be multiple administrators within your account. Administrators can oversee collaborative activities. Administrators grant and revoke permissions of member collaborators.

Why does GetArchive provide this service free for public domain archives?

language First, a humanitarian reason: We want to make the riches of public domain media from various sources to become readily available anywhere, anytime, on any device, free and worldwide.

Second, a practical reason: We want the public to get involved. To unleash people’s creativity, we’ve created the largest searchable database of digitized public domain media and provide our cloud-based services and software for free to place even more content in the public domain.

Read more about public domain media.

Where can I put my collections online?

lightbulb_outline You decide where you want your collections to be seen. It is really easy to integrate an organization’s Web Widget on as many web pages as you wish. There is no limit on the number of access points to your archive. Moreover, if you decide that your archive collection should be available to work on any domain, it will.

It is easy as 1-2-3 to place GetArchive Web Widget code on any HTML, PHP and other types of sites. The Web Widget setup page in your GetArchive account helps to configure widget parameters. The widget is adaptive. It can be wide or narrow. It works well on any page.

You can grant and revoke permissions anytime. In case you choose a wildcard option, your media collection can be accessible from any web page or a blog where the GetArchive Web Widget code is placed.

Who can use my public domain images and media files?

cached Public domain images and other media files will appear on your Web Widgets, API, and the biggest public domain media search engine PICRYL.com. On Picryl.com, they will also appear on your organization’s profile page, in collections in where they are featured. And this is only for a start.

In addition to the tools for managing digital collections, GetArchive provides creative tools for scholars, students, and anybody who wants to create videos, presentations, comment and re-use public domain media. There is a good chance that your public domain images, videos, and collections will start living their own life, getting used and re-used.

While no one can enforce users to give credits for public domain media they use, most people will be happy to credit the initial publisher. We will do our best to promote those publishers who use public domain media for public promotion. We encourage users to mention and link to the “original” file and we make it is as easy to do from the technical perspective.

Do we need IT people to implement GetArchvie on our website?

extension Short answer: It’s up to you. We provide tools that make integration happen and do not require IT on your side. Long Answer: If you have IT people, there is a lot more we can do together. For instance, instead of duplicating your collections in our cloud, we can pull them directly from your existing servers.

We would be happy to talk to your IT people if you have them. There are many ways to integrate our platform with your existing web properties, some are easy and don’t require IT background, some do require it but provide great benefits the standard tools cannot deliver.

For webmasters: GetArchvie open API gives developers flexibility on how to place your archive-in-the-cloud digital library content on your website. See our open API documentation. If you don’t know good developers, we can recommend teams for you to choose from. Please contact us if you have any API and integration related questions, we will be happy to chat.

How does GetArchive encourages online social interactions?

share The GetArchive platform has built-in tools to encourage social interactions: likes, comments, and sharing. GetArchive tools encourage users to re-use content, create their own collections, presentations, videos, slideshows, and mashups. By providing the public with access to your archive reaches, your organization gets credits, visitors, good publicity. It gains popularity. Our platform features the ways of converting all this to connections, memberships, and sponsors.

Our customers have access to state of the art mobile apps, web widgets, social sharing tools, mobile notifications we built into our products. We provide all necessary tools so customers able to publish and share their content such as photographs, manuscripts, books, videos, and sounds online and on mobile. We help you stay in constant contact with patrons and sponsors, while we take care of all things technical.

Are my media files and collections safe?

lock Yes. GetArchive provides you with the tools to build, manage and preserve your digital collections. GetArchive uses Amazon Cloud to store your files. Amazon Cloud is the current leader in cloud storage providing multiple levels of security and backup. In addition to Amazon built in features, we implement our own measures to protect your data from physical and cyber disasters or corruption. You can rely on GetArchive to secure your files in Amazon ISO-certified data centers.

What happens if I decide to close my account?

stop Using our export tool, you are able to export media files and metadata if needed. If you close your account, all of your copyrighted media can be exported, and then deleted from the GetArchive servers.

What happens with public domain media when the original account is down?

account_balance The public domain copyright status cannot be revoked retroactively since somebody could already be using the media on their web sites, printed media, presentations, etc. The media lawfully placed in the public domain should stay in public domain. If someone published public domain images and media using GetArchive services, we consider ourselves responsible for keeping the media files accessible online even if the original publisher account is closed. We will keep all the metadata, descriptions and links intact, so users can keep crediting the original object.