As we get to the End Of Financial Year again we have taken the time to review the last 12 months, and we’ve got to say it’s been a real mixed bag!
Some of the highlights of the last twelve months have been the international conferences that we have attended - some of the most interesting events we’ve attended over the last few years. A few of us headed to Wellington, New Zealand to attend the International Conference on Digital Preservation (IPRES) and the Pacific Regional Branch of the International Council of Archives (PARBICA) conference. Both were eye opening events, and looking east of Australia into the Pacific gave us a range of new ideas that we combined into our Duct Tape and Downloads training, which we’ve just returned from delivering in Ipoh, Malaysia at the SouthEast Asia-Pacific Audio Visual Archive Association (SEAPAVAA) conference. These international forays have really tuned our training a lot; we’re now looking for the opportunities to deliver this course to archivists here in Australia - and stay tuned for more updates on that to come!
We also did things locally as well - including attending not one but two of the Western Australian branch of the Australian Society of Archives Professional Development days (one on archival management systems and one on the Records in Context standard), giving a talk about our work with the Shared Environmental Analytics Facility at the Environmental Institute of Australia and New Zealand’s Environmental Impact Symposium, and we attended the Joint Technical Symposium which was a great lead in to the SEAPAVAA conference.
On the downside, we continue - like many businesses - to feel the impacts of things that happen in other parts of the world. Our work has been impacted in the last year - and in the last six months in particular - by two main things: war and Artificial Intelligence (AI). We’ve seen - like pretty much every other global business - changes in the global economy caused by wars that mean many of our clients have had significant increases in their costs. This has led to a range of belt tightening and as a result we’ve seen our team shrink in the last financial year as we deal with some of those issues; and we continue to monitor these impacts as we move forward.
AI has been something we’ve been working around the edges of for a long time, and this financial year the sudden acceleration of the use of AI has caught everyone by surprise. We were able to, thanks to some innovation by our team, to keep on the crest of the wave of AI with our internal processes around governance, and our team embracing it where it makes sense. Our current work on the National Archives of Australia project, where we’ve implemented our Metadata Annotation and Transcription Engine (MATE), is just one example of how embracing AI for the right reasons and the right problems, is a key aspect to harnessing this transformational technology. Alongside that, apart from our internal work on AI, we’re also out there giving as much as we can to help education our key industries, with my recent talk on AI at SEAPAVAA, and my new role with the Steering Committee of the Environment Institute of Australia and New Zealand’s AI Community of Practice. AI has some amazing benefits, but there is no doubt it is being over-hyped in many areas - the key is using it where it makes sense.
We’ve also seen many other good wins during the year in project land - we continue to work with a number of repeat clients and one of our big projects this last year was working with the aforementioned Shared Environmental Analytics Facility. This work is just kicking along again with our team delivering a few projects for the Pilbara Biodiversity and Renewables Environmental Research Initiative. That sort of work across these broader areas of the environment has been really rewarding for us over the last twelve months, and we look forward to working more on this into the future. And of course, our archival clients like Queensland State Archives continue to be really rewarding to work with across areas like Archival Management Systems and Digital Preservation Systems.
Finally, it wouldn’t be a financial year recap without mention of our 2026 team week. Held over three days - well, to be fair, it’s over a week when you count the travel time for the team - it’s a real celebration of what we do and our people. It’s only our third full team week we’ve held but this was a real highlight - getting to spend a day on strategy and then a day connecting with the team over at Rottnest Island (especially doing the beach clean that we did across Thompson’s Bay to help with Clean Up Australia Day) were both real highlights for the week.
So as the 2025-2026 financial year winds down and we shake it off and move into the next one it has been a time for reflection and introspection for us. The year hasn’t been super smooth, but it has been another year that we’ve ridden the rollercoaster - for the 23rd year, in fact. As we reset and start again for the 24th year, there’s a lot to build on, and a lot that we can learn from - and we look forward to doing that with you in the near future!
Piers