The Tabularium Website - Hosted by State Records NSW
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Where did Tabularium come from?Tabularium was conceived in the later Keeping Archives workshops run by the New South Wales Branch of the Australian Society of Archivists in the early 1990s, in which it became clear that archivists, particularly in small archives, need an easy-to-use software product to help them manage their archives. It was particularly important that such a product should support the series system, emerging descriptive standards and sound Australian archival practice. Very few products were available to meet this need at that time. The closest to meeting this need was Clive Smith's 'Small Archives Control System' (SACS), written in dBASE III and, unfortunately, never finalised and released. SACS' implementation of the series system was a real inspiration for Tabularium, which can be regarded as having picked up where SACS left off. It was clear that, for most archivists, translating archival control systems into a database design was still a major barrier to developing a computer-aided control system. The original plan, therefore, was to produce a data model based on an analysis of the series system as it is, or could be, applied in a range of archival operations. Archivists would be able to take the model to a systems designer and say 'Build this'. To be confident that this data model would be useful, it was necessary to test it by designing a database that could, in addition, be made available to archivists who could not or did not want to design one themselves using the data model. This became Tabularium. The product had to be:
This suggested using one of the new breed of powerful but easy-to-use Windows relational database products, among which Microsoft Access was emerging as market leader. To keep it easy to customise and to minimise the scope for things going wrong, it was designed as a database to sit on top of Access, rather than a separate application using a run-time version of the database software. Finally the product was to focus specifically on archives management and was to promote sound archival practice based on the series system. Tabularium Version 1 was extensively tested and/or reviewed by a group of about 15 archivists in local government bodies, universities, schools, professional associations and community groups, mostly in Sydney and Melbourne, during late 1996 and 1997. The Sydney City Archives was the principal test site, as well as a source of constant encouragement. Version 1 was released in late 1997. Tabularium was also adopted as the basis for the control system for the State archives in NSW, which has proved that Tabularium is scaleable to a large archives institution and adaptable to the complex administrative structures spanning 200 years of colonial and State government. Tabularium Version 2 was developed from late 2001 to August 2003, with some of the early improvements being included in Version 1.1 released in July 2002. An alpha release and several beta releases of Version 2 between July 2002 and July 2003 provided feedback from users. The Upgrade version was tested using Version 1 databases provided by five small archives. Tabularium has been designed to help archivists apply sound practice in a range of archives management activities and to be consistent with the practices promoted in:
Tabularium Version 1 received a Phyllis Mander Jones Award from the Australian Society of Archivists in 1998 as '...the publication making the greatest contribution to archives or a related field in Australia written by a person in their own right.' CreditsWindows and Access and are registered trademarks of the Microsoft Corporation. |
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© David Roberts and the Government of New South Wales MMIV E-mail: tabularium.archives@gmail.com This page updated 21/07/2008 |