2023 in a Canvas

[dp...@metro.org]

Dearest friends,

Gregorian Calendar wise, 2023 is almost done. Which means it also feels appropriate to look back, reflect as a community of hard working individuals and caring institutions, all what we have accomplished together, and at the same time use this opportunity to share with you a bit of our own happenings and internal work, sometimes invisible, sometimes very vocal and explicit in our daily slack interactions.

Many of you launched their first Archipelagos in production this year and the same is true also for us a METRO. Migrations happened, CSVs flowed, APIs interacted, coffees went cold (& not wasted), LoD connected terms to urls, themes were polished, metadata was remediated and improved and we all learned from each other, sharing use cases, needs, tricks of the trade. The community grew and expanded geographically. New countries, languages and needs. We stopped millions (a day) of AI/GPT-ish bots and managed to reflect about the future of our field, human labor and culture while doing so. But mostly, it was a year of embracing stability, reacting and learning from the reality of what Internet has become, will become, our own needs and capacities, what we expect from a repository system, what we want to offer our visitors. 2023 was also the year of giving long term maintenance the proper value it deserves as a concept, while still moving forward all together at a more mature peace, being careful of not leaving anyone behind. 

It was also a lot of change, individual and communal (which is also hard sometimes).

Archipelago, the software ecosystem, had 2 larger releases and a smaller backwards compatible release. We moved from 1.0.0 to 1.3.0. For this we wrote 14,949 lines of new PHP and Javascript code, and removed 2054 lines. Our deployment strategies had over 28K changes in configurations, new containers, new versions of almost everything. And most important, we managed to move from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10 adding many new features while improving existing ones. A few of your Repositories are already running on all the newer versions without issues. All this without data/object/workflow deprecations. Our oldest (or wisest?) live/production repository (means managed by our team) has been up 24/7 since 2020, almost 4 years old (being Archipelago 5 y/o since our first public alpha)

In specific, our team at METRO executed the migration of approximately 500K+ digital objects into new Archipelago homes for some of you and more than 3 Million OCRs were processed in a single year. We also provided custom development (new features to directly support particular partner use cases) that then became part of the releases, custom theming, twig templates, server upgrades and configuration services.

Hundreds of training, consultation, and meeting sessions for different Archipelago partners happened and dozens of pages of new documentation, and updated legacy documentation to reflect the latest Archipelago features and functionality were written by our team.

We officially relaunched DCMNY (https://dcmny.org), METRO’s shared repository space for NYC and Westchester County partners, following our own internal migration from a legacy platform to Archipelago. Since our official launch, we’ve ingested new collections for 3 new partner institutions, and have several more in the pipeline for early 2024.

Our team also had the opportunity and privilege to present at multiple conferences throughout 2023, including IIIF Annual and Midwinter meetings, Creative Commons Conference in NYC, and DLF. Also during DLF we were happy to see many of you, and  your own presentations and shared experiences using Archipelago. 

Archipelago’s Slack channel has had over 3000+ messages exchanged in public channels (and many caring emojis including all valid (unicode) colored hearts)

And for 2024, we already expect the community to grow again (adding more carved marks to that door frame). We have been working with several new institutions who will implementing Archipelago in 2024. We will be enthusiastically welcoming new community members when they come onboard and we know you all will do so too.

In a gist. It was a hard-worked year. We are grateful for all the ones that contributed to this work. We made new friends and we learned to trust each other even more. We are grateful for the ones that are still with us and for the ones that walked the same path but had to leave. We are also grateful to be part of such a caring community. We aim to do better in 2024, by being more inclusive and open as we keep evolving into a healthy(ier)/mature OSS community driven software ecosystem that serves the needs of many. We honestly hope using Archipelago has been a good, enjoyable experience for you all so far and we can't wait to hear more from you after the holidays so we can make it even better.

Thanks again for everything,

Kind regards (& be kind to each other)

Allison and Diego 

METRO