About

What is CAO

Want to find out if an archive in Connecticut has information on a topic you are researching? Search CAO.  Do you like and appreciate CAO? Let your legislator know!

Connecticut’s Archives Online (CAO) was undertaken by the Western Connecticut State University Archives in 2008 and is a project that leverages the power and portability of EAD to search archival holdings in our state. We are continually looking for additional Connecticut repositories to participate in this endeavor which is free to users and participants.  Click here if your repository would like to participate.

CAO is not itself a repository. We simply offer users a way to search across many of Connecticut’s archival repositories. If you find something in CAO, contact the repository to which the materials belong. Repository contact information is available on our site.

Who is CAO for?

It is for archivists and the public. Archivists can use it to search their own materials or help patrons with materials in their geographic area. The public can use CAO to get an easy snapshot of what CT’s primary source holdings are in relation to a given topic.

You can even easily add a CAO search box to your site.

How does CAO work?

If a repository has finding aid data in EAD, we can search it.

If the repository doesn’t have finding aids or their data in EAD, we can provide access to tools to help to turn that around.  Contact us if you’d like help creating EAD.  We can even help you to create a repository level finding aid for your material.

CAO utilizes the great work undertaken by the ArcLight project which is itself based on BlackLight – a Ruby on Rails application. ArcLight and our customization and configurations are all open source. 

CAO continues to run on WCSU servers and is administered by WCSU archivists Brian Stevens and Stacy Haponik. Any questions? Feel free to contact us!

Our GitHub site is at: https://github.com/archivalGrysbok/wcsu-arclight