The first public version of the ResCarta Toolkit was released in January 2004 at the American Library Association meeting in San Diego, CA.
The ResCarta Toolkit is a set of Java applications and utility programs that create and maintain digital objects with associated metadata. The applications provide tools for the creation, collection, indexing and access to standardized digital objects. Digital objects are maintained on a local file system. The metadata is stored within each digital object. The ResCarta-Web application uses JSP and the Java Servlet API. ResCarta digital objects are made available primarily via a web interface, it also creates OAI_DC output for use by OAI-PMH v2.0 servers. Metadata is stored natively in Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS). ResCarta-Web supports in line metadata using COinS, and RSS. Most recent versions of the ResCarta Toolkit also support the use of BroadCast WAV format with full text automatic audio transcription (AAT) based on CMU Sphinx for storage and access to oral histories and news casts.