opencasket

OpenCasket is an open-source software platform designed to help organizations manage digital assets and their lifecycles. The project emphasizes interoperability, extensibility, and a modular architecture, enabling ingestion, cataloging, storage, and retrieval of media and documents across multiple backends while enforcing access controls and provenance tracking.

OpenCasket began as a community-driven initiative in the early 2020s, with contributors from libraries, archives, and software developers. The project publishes its source code on public repositories and operates under a permissive open-source license. A governance model invites maintainers and contributors to propose changes, review code, and discuss design decisions.

Key features include a core asset service that handles ingestion, versioning, and search; a plugin system for storage backends (local, network, cloud) and metadata schemas; and APIs for integration with external systems. It supports pluggable authentication, event logging, and audit trails to support compliance needs.

Architecture emphasizes decoupling through well-defined interfaces and data interchange formats. The design favors JSON-based metadata, pluggable storage adapters, and a containerized deployment approach to support scalable installations.

Use cases span digital archives, research data repositories, media companies, and cultural heritage institutions. The OpenCasket community provides documentation, tutorials, and contribution guidelines, with discussions on mailing lists and issue trackers. The project aims to serve as an open standard for asset management in diverse environments.

As with many open-source projects, adoption varies by community, and ongoing development focuses on expanding metadata interoperability and performance.