I am literally wavering on the edge of simply accepting that this tool is going to become one of those hopeless dinosaurs that everyone uses because everyone uses it. It is still in my estimation, a tool that attempts to substitute xml coding skills (Such as those in EAD, MARCXML, METS, etc.), with an arcane skill in using an overly generalized software program. No help list is more rife with misunderstanding and confusion then the list serve in my mailbox for Archivist toolkit, yet this also may be a sign of how broadly accepted it is.
Is it easy to use? Initially, but is it easy to make do what YOU need it to do? No. You will need to know how to play with XML style sheets to make it output properly, and if you know that, then why would you need to input your finding aid into Archivist toolkit when you could have just marked it up from text form?
I have always warned the collection managers I have worked with against accepting that any software program will somehow do away with the need for expert operators, but AT seems to promise precisely that. What all managers forget, is that they are merely trading off one expertise for another. In this case, in what is and will be the primary markup language that provides actual and usable interoperability(XML), for expertise in a software program. (AT.) They are still going to require a database specialist to use AT, wheres the savings?
Heres my prediction. When AT provides a working digital object instance, I am going to be asked to use it again by some institution. Its an inevitable inertia. I'm being asked to use it now, and even the archivist I work with acknowledges that the work we are doing in AT will go largely ignored once these grants are done. But, as I am doing now, eve after they make the improvements everyone is demanding, it is still going to be easier to mark up a text output for those objects then it will be to input them into AT.
The lesson that should always stand, and always will, do not get married to software.
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