IDEA@ALM is a sophisticated out of the box system for the collection management, preservation and exposure of heritage assets in archives, libraries and museums at cultural heritage institutions and research centers. IDEA@ALM seamlessly handles diverse types of physical, digital and logical information regardless of their origin, format, structure or language with unique multi-lingual support.

• Centralized management of diversified collections within a single database supports the presentation of distinct collections together with ease of administration. Common infrastructure enables metadata mapping and information retrieval across collections.

• Diverse physical, digital and logical entities: Seamless support, regardless of their origin, format, structure and language.

• Multilingual and multiscript support at three levels:
  User interface, which can easily be customized in different languages.
  Unicode support and a powerful search engine with advanced linguistic functions for data entry and retrieval in various scripts.
  Content translation and management of item fields in parallel language layers for data presentation in the user's language of choice.

• Support of industry standards and interoperability protocols ISAD (G), ISAAR, RAD2, EAD, Dublin Core, MARC export and Z39.50, with powered import and export utilities, offering resource-sharing capabilities and connectivity with other systems.

• Flexibility to arrange collections in separate databanks, each with predefined and/or customized templates. Data entry and search fields can be added and modified

• Dynamic screen layout according to user's profiles.

• Advanced Web interface for discovery and exposure of the collections and for remote cataloging. User friendly and accessible interfaces with subject based clustering and Web 2.0 features (such as recommendations and users’ ranking) enhance the user experience.

• Thesaurus management streamlining all aspects of thesaurus work: construction, management, and maintenance with a graphical tree structure.

• Advanced linguistic search functions: phonetic, lexical stem, synonym and fuzzy.

• Full-text search within linked textual documents and/or files such as PDF or Word.

• Links and logical mapping between diversified collections, information islands and ALM domains form an institutional knowledge map.

• Open architecture based on Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle databases with an advanced set of APIs and XML-based web services for seamless integration with third-party systems and repositories, including access to the collections through custom interfaces built by the institution.

• Digital collection support to link and view all popular types of digital objects including text files, images, audio and video files. Ingest of objects directly from scanners.

• Interoperability with other platforms such as Google publishing to expose the online catalog items directly to Google; support for RSS feeds; and support for embedding HTML and other external application codes such as Google Maps.

• Advanced administration tools allowing the system administrator to configure the system without need for additional coding. This enables the institution to respond to and reflect future changes in collections development without being dependent on IDEA or the local vendor.

• Customizable design with various look and feel options to reflect the institution’s character.

• Granular authorization levels from the databank to the item and down to the field levels and enhanced authentication with Active Directory integration.

• Workflow management: Flexible creation of customizable workflows to support the institution’s specific work procedures and methodologies throughout the items’ lifecycles.

• Report generator: IDEA@ALM is supplied with a report generator by Business Objects and a standard set of reports. Reports can be defined and generated for organizational and individual record levels. Includes flexible field selection, graphical support, and various export formats including Excel and complex WYSIWYG DTP enhanced reports.

• Panorama module for federated search over multiple separated physical databases within consortia environments.