Happy Holidays from the Archipelago Team at METRO! (End of 2024 edition)

[dp...@metro.org]

Dear Archipelago Commons community members, implementers, vendors, colleagues, users and maintainers, wider repository community members and everyone watching this digital realm.

Another year has passed and we, Allison and I, have seen many of you walk the sometimes windy but never boring road of implementing Archipelago as the place where you put the results of your hard labor; steward and refine, and share with the world, for the years to come. We have accompanied many of you and tried to be helpful guides for your own personal journeys, and we are truly thankful (Danke, Gracias, Grazie) for all the lessons you have taught us, use cases and needs you have shared, and the opportunity you have provided us to pursue better code, better documentation and to encourage a healthy, kinder community of peers.

For us, 2024 marks 6 years since Archipelago first evolved from an Idea to actual Implementation, from a small group of supporting colleagues to a larger community of peers. Nothing would have been possible without the many individuals, friends and colleagues who believed in our humble attempts to make a different type of software for you all. Thank you so much.

We, as a team, want to also use this instance to make a tiny 2024 reflection. 

In a world of instant digital gratification, AI bots scraping every website that exists to provide cheap and contextual unaware shortcuts to information, your(and you) and our(us) care-driven labor producing metadata, curating descriptions, code, executing quality digitalization and thinking of better, more human friendly ways of enabling discovery, is even more relevant than ever, putting a lot of (good) responsibility on everyone involved in this interconnected network of collaborative care and efforts towards a better internet.

Our work is a reminder that what we preserve and share with our communities has the potential of writing a narrative that extends beyond technology trends, can and should be inclusive, can evolve (and should) and has space for (and needs more) diversity and outliers. We are stewards of the many artifacts of our societal creations and facets of our society that are vulnerable to erasure and would be normally obscured by statistically normalization of ML model outputs. 

We can’t deny that ML can have many positive uses in our shared landscape and we embrace them through practical and respectful implementations and research, but we also acknowledge that they already have labor, environmental, historical bias, and diversity aware and unaware implications. 

We value and are grateful that our community is watchful of this and has already worked for years establishing the right values and capacities to assume these new challenges. We want to assure you all that also our code (and our code of ethics too) is here to support you all and that we are committed to your long term efforts for diversity and equality.

We hope to hear and see even more of you this upcoming year. Happy Holidays and solstice, wherever you are in this physical World. 

Diego and Allison

Archipelago Commons and Digital Services Team at METRO