Customization

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Here we will link some examples of AtoM customization by community members which can be achieved without developer support. Have a resource to add, or one that you know about which is publicly available? Please help us by adding it!

Seealso

Looking for custom development, such as plugins, themes, and code patches? Check out our Community development page:

Community development

Help pages

Below are some examples of ways that AtoM administrators have tried to make their catalogues easier to use for their public users. Many of these examples use AtoM's existing static page and menu modules. Please feel free to add your own resources!

Tip

For details on creating new static pages see our documentation for your current version; specifically see Manage Static Pages and Manage Menus.

Beaton Institutite Project guides

The Beaton Institute at Cape Breton University has used a creative mix of static pages and subject terms to create beautiful user guides to their holdings. See some examples below:

Mills Archive help pages

The Mills Archive AtoM site includes a number of inter-linked static pages, created to help users understand how to use the catalogue. Here are some direct links to some examples:

City of Vancouver Archives search help

The City of Vancouver Archives created an "About Searching" help page using the static page functionality in AtoM.

CVA's About Searching page

Simon Fraser University user guides

At Simon Fraser University, the SFU Archives and SFU Library's Special Collections and Rare Books share an AtoM instance, using AtoM's multi-institutional functionality. To assist their users, they have created an extremely detailed search guide, as well as a User's guide to finding aids, explaining (among other things), how hierarchical description is used in archives, how the reference codes are constructed, and more.

MemoryNS video tutorials

MemoryNS, the Nova Scotian archival union catalogue maintained by the Council of Nova Scotia Archives (CNSA), has created a number of video tutorials on searching, browsing, and much more, and included the playlist of videos in a static page in their AtoM instance. Check it out here:

MemoryNS Tutorial videos

Borthwick Institute for Archives' FAQ and Glossary pages

The Borthwick Institute for Archives at the University of York has included two static pages to support their users - an FAQ, and a Glossary of archival terms used in the catalogue:

Glossary
FAQ

Dumbarton Oaks' AtoM@DO Help/About page

Rich with both general information and details on how to perform basic public user functions in ICA-AtoM (such as using search, advanced search, printing file reports, exporting, etc.) the AtoM@DO Help page is a useful resource, and a good model for how institutions using AtoM can supply helpful information to support the needs of their users.

AtoM@DO FAQ

Australia National University Archives' Help searching page

With content describing over 20km of material (ca. 1800 collections, over 1200 creators), ANU ensures that their users have a helpful resource nearby. This help page is maintained in HTML outside of AtoM, but is linked in the AtoM database via the Quick links menu, and mentioned on the home page

ANU's Database help page

Institution pages

Here are some examples of users who have taken advantage of the Archival institution theming options in AtoM and implemented them in creative ways!

Guelph Public Library Archeion page

Guelph Public Library Archives has done extensive customizations to their Archeion (union database for the Archives Association of Ontario). For details on editing an institutional page see our documentation for your current version, particularly Archival Institutions.

Guelph Public Library Archives in Archeion

Stylesheets

This section will include alternative XSLTs and other stylesheets that can be used in AtoM. As of the 2.2 release, an XSLT is used to transform archival description EAD XML into PDF or RTF finding aids, for example.

French XSLTs for finding aid generation

At this time, the labels used in the Finding aid XSLTs are hard-coded, meaning that they cannot easily be translated for use in other languages. However, Les archives de la Ville de Montréal has created French versions of AtoM's XSLTs. If you would like your Finding aids to be generated with French labels instead of English ones, a developer can swap the following XSLTs in to replace the default ones included in AtoM.

french-xslts.tgz (tarball, 3 files, 31.1 KB)

To swap the XSLTs:

Download, and then extract, the tarball files linked above
In your AtoM instance, navigate via the command-line to lib/task/pdf/
Replace the existing files with those found in tarball
Clear application cache, restart services (php5-fpm, webserver, atom-worker) - the following examples assume you've installed using Nginx as your webserver:

If you are using Ubuntu 14.04 with PHP5.x:

$ php symfony cc
$ sudo service nginx restart
$ sudo service php5-fpm restart
$ sudo restart atom-worker

If you are using Ubuntu 16.04 with PHP7.0:

$ php symfony cc
$ sudo systemctl restart nginx
$ sudo systemctl restart php7.0-fpm
$ sudo systemctl restart atom-worker

You may need to clear your web browser's cache to see the changes take effect as well.

You should now see French labels when you generate your next finding aid!