FOR ARCHIVES, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS & LIBRARIES
Special collections are where institutional memory is kept, and where the processing backlog is measured in years. You already have systems. What is missing is the workflow that connects them to how the work is actually done. And before any of that, we should talk about control.
BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE
Archivists have watched images and records scraped to train models they never consented to. So, first: nothing we build sends your material anywhere you have not approved. Your data stays under your control. Description, access decisions, and donor restrictions stay with the archivist. Everything we build is documented and portable, so nothing depends on us. Then we can talk about capacity.
WHAT YOU ARE CARRYING
Boxes accessioned years ago and not yet processed. Finding aids that describe half the holdings. Digitization projects that produced images without metadata. Rights and reproduction requests, donor restrictions, and access decisions that only an archivist should make. Preservation copies on storage nobody has tested restoring. And researchers who cannot find what you already hold.
WHAT WE HEAR
Scans without description are storage, not access. Reading, transcribing, and tagging at scale is where machines can carry the volume, while the archivist keeps authority over every description that is published.
Processing knowledge lives in a head, not in the system. We put the workflow where the next archivist can find it, and connect the tools you already own to the way the work actually moves.
Preservation exists in policy more than in practice. Offsite copies, restore tests on a schedule, accounts and permissions that match who actually works here.
WHERE WE BEGIN
Preservation storage with tested restores. Accounts and permissions cleaned. The old server retired without losing a file.
Your collections and asset systems connected to how processing actually happens, so description is entered once and found everywhere.
Reading, transcribing, matching, and reconstructing at scale, under the archivist’s authority. Method published, including where it fails.
HOW WE BUILD
Everything we set up assumes you will grow. Five people today, fifty in a few years: the tools, the permissions, the data, the costs are chosen so that nothing has to be torn out and rebuilt on the way up.
Tools, permissions, and data that hold at five people and at fifty.
The most capable option inside what you can carry, not the most expensive one.
Current, well-supported technology only. Nothing that is old in three years.
Nothing switched off until the old record and the new one agree.
We work the way we advise. Systems we supervise carry the searching, drafting, testing, and documenting; people who know the field review every decision. A practice this size can therefore take on this scope, and keep its price within reach of a nonprofit.
START HERE
Book a first conversation. It costs nothing.