The problem with archival records going digital
Libraries, national archives, universities, and cultural institutions hold thousands — sometimes millions — of documents, photographs, maps, and records. For most of history, finding something in those collections meant physically visiting, asking a librarian, and hoping someone had indexed it properly.
The shift to digital has changed what's possible. But digitizing records is only half the work. The harder part is making them discoverable — structured, searchable, and accessible to researchers anywhere in the world.
That's exactly the problem AtoM was built to solve.
What is AtoM?
AtoM stands for Access to Memory. It's an open-source web application designed specifically for archival description and public access to archival collections. Originally developed by Artefactual Systems in collaboration with the International Council on Archives (ICA), it implements international archival standards out of the box: ISAD(G), ISAAR(CPF), ISDF, and ISDIAH.
In practical terms, AtoM lets institutions:
- Describe archival collections following international standards
- Publish finding aids online, searchable by researchers anywhere
- Manage authority records for creators, functions, and institutions
- Handle multilingual interfaces and descriptions
- Control access levels for different types of records
It's the platform of choice for national archives, university libraries, municipal archives, historical societies, and cultural memory institutions across more than 100 countries.
Who uses AtoM?
The typical AtoM user is not a software developer — it's an archivist, a librarian, or a records manager who needs a robust system that follows the standards their profession requires.
Institutions that benefit most from AtoM include national and regional archives looking to provide public online access to their holdings, university libraries managing special collections and institutional records, museums and cultural institutions with documentary collections, government agencies with records management obligations, and research centers that need to describe and share primary source materials.
If your institution holds archival materials and needs to make them findable — to researchers, to the public, or to other institutions — AtoM is the most widely adopted open-source solution available.
What does "open-source" mean in practice?
AtoM is free to download and use. The code is maintained by Artefactual Systems and a community of contributors, and new versions are released regularly. There are no licensing fees.
What open-source doesn't mean is zero cost. Running AtoM properly requires a server, a configured technology stack (PHP, MySQL, Elasticsearch, Node.js), ongoing maintenance, security updates, and someone with the technical knowledge to manage it. For most archival institutions — whose staff expertise is in archival science, not server administration — that's a significant operational burden.
Self-hosted vs. managed: the real question
Many institutions start by installing AtoM on their own servers or asking their university IT department to handle it. This works, but it comes with trade-offs that often become apparent only after problems arise: servers go down during peak research periods, Elasticsearch stops indexing without warning, upgrades break custom configurations, and backups aren't tested until they're needed.
Managed AtoM hosting shifts that responsibility to a provider with expertise in the platform. Installation, configuration, updates, backups, and monitoring are handled by people who work with AtoM daily — not by a general IT team that treats it as one of dozens of systems to maintain.
For institutions where the archival collection is the core mission, managed hosting means staff can focus on what they do best: describing, preserving, and providing access to records.
What to look for in an AtoM hosting provider
Not all hosting is equal. When evaluating a managed AtoM hosting provider, the key questions are whether they have specific experience with AtoM (not just generic Linux hosting), whether upgrades and updates are handled proactively, what their backup policy and tested recovery procedures look like, whether they can assist with data migration from another system, and whether support is provided by people who understand archival workflows — not just server administrators.
At Paideia Hosting, we run AtoM on AWS infrastructure with daily backups, proactive monitoring, and support from a team that has worked with archival and academic platforms for over a decade. Our AtoM hosting plans cover everything from installation to ongoing maintenance, so your institution can focus on its collections rather than its servers.
Interested in moving your archival system to managed hosting? Contact our team and we'll walk you through the migration process.