It seems to come around quicker and quicker, but it’s time for another end of calendar year wrap up blog (and yes, I reused the title quip from last year too).
2025 has been another big year, and this year as I reflect back across the year, I find myself looking back fondly and quite equally across our two core areas; the collections and the environment sectors.
In the environment sector, much of our work this year has been focused on data management systems and pipelines. It saw us deliver on the production system of the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Change’s Biodiversity Data Repository, which has been a major project for us across several years. The pipeline that the team built takes biodiversity data from the various States and Territories around Australia and converts that relational data into graph ready format - and it was a project that was a labour of love for our team as well. It’s the sort of project that really gets us going - being able to make the world a better place by implementing solutions that address the findings of the Samuels Report.
We continued to work in the environmental space on other projects - including our work this year with the Western Australian Biodiversity Science Institute on the Shared Environmental Analytics Facility (SEAF). Our work here has focused on the Pilbara, where we’ve been working on operationalising a range of scientific models from simple Extent of Occurrence detection through to more complex Species Distribution Models. This is done within a highly secure environment that enables private data to be accessible to these models but not exposed wider use.
There are many other environmental projects we’ve participated in this year across federal and state governments in Australia, and in a range of private companies as well. Across all of these projects we keep looking at our mission - to make the world a better place - and we apply that to every project that we do. This means that we do work with mining and extraction companies as well - but only when the work is about better managing the environment in these cases. It’s been a mission statement that has kept us reviewing what we do, and why we do it.
The collections field was also a big year - and my memories will be dominated by our work with the Queensland State Archives and the IPRES and PARBICA conferences where we showed our work off to the world.
The conferences gave us the opportunity to give back to a community that has been one that we’ve really become very interested in. Our Digital Preservation training workshop that we did (and will be releasing in the new year as a training course) went down well at both conferences and really gave us a boost that what we were doing was - again - making the world a better place. Hearing the stories of how some of the Pacific nations are struggling with even the basics of archival practices due to limited resources has given us a raft of ideas about how we can do more to assist these groups into the future.
Our long term partnership with the Queensland State Archives (QSA) has just seen a major release go through (as forecast by their Facebook post below) as well - with the major review and evergreening of their system that went live five years ago.
Behind the scenes, our team (along with our partners at Hudson Molonglo) beavered away with updates to the core ArchivesSpace and Archivematica open source software, and the other components that we have implemented in the QSA archival ecosystem (“Archie” as it’s called). The release across the weekend of the 4th to 9th of December was an intense period of activity for both our teams and the QSA teams, and it is the culmination of a very busy year improving and updating the system - which we will continue to support for a few more years yet.
Our people that work on these projects are a bunch that I’m very proud to work with. Our team continues to focus on the delivery of value to our customers, and that has meant some really interesting discussions - including how we work with clients to make sure that they get the best outcome, and managing our own projects and budgets to deliver even more value than we thought we could. That focus on value is a strength that fits well with our other company values of sustainability, accountability, integrity and empathy, and I’m really delighted to see our people embodying those values in their work, and I’m looking forward to discussing them throughout our next Team Week in Perth in February, 2026.
2026 is lining up to be very interesting. We will see more work with our existing clients and a range of other projects that are lining up to kick off, including our new Digital Preservation courses and other initiatives that we recently announced. While I’m looking forward to the break, I’m also really looking forward to seeing where 2026 takes us!
See you in the new year - and have a great Christmas break.
Piers