Recent Posts

I’m just back from the annual Society of American Archivists conference, held this year in sunny Anaheim, California, the home of Disneyland (the conference hotel was more or less adjacent to Disneyland and in fact offered rooms with a Disneyland view, which…I did not book). In many ways it felt like a markedly different conference than in the past, both because it was on the West Coast (so had a very different attendee base) but also because this year’s hot topic (as you might expect) was AI. While the AI conversation in archives feels far from settled, and there are clearly some widely divergent and strongly held beliefs about if and how the technology should be used in archives (or at all), I did notice a few themes emerging.

We’ve just completed a second round of development on the Fluxx Exporter, which sought to address bugs and usability issues we learned about from users. The new version of the application substantially improves ease of installation and configuration and enhances existing functionality in several key areas. Read on for a summary of what we did and what’s next.

We just deployed a major re-architecting of our digital ingest services which we believe will improve the energy efficiency, speed and maintainability of this pipeline. This project has been a while in the making, so I thought I’d take the time to reflect on where we’ve been, where we are now, and what comes next.

In January, we announced the initial release of the Fluxx Exporter tool, an open-source tool that integrates with the grants management system Fluxx for the purposes of automating exports of select elements of grant records. In the months since its release, our team responsible for continued development and maintenance of the tool (in close consultation with our Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library partner) tested the application with a cohort of Fluxx users at five institutions to identify opportunities to improve the tool based on user experience and feedback. I’d like to share the results of that testing and our planned next steps to address usability issues and add new functionality.

Attending the Texas Conference on Digital Libraries (TCDL) may seem an odd choice for an archivist located in New York, but the values and work of the RAC and the conference host organization, the Texas Digital Library (TDL) are strongly aligned in areas of community building, open infrastructure, and broad access.