Goodbye 2025! A brief summary of the highlights and lowlights…

My 2025 started badly and ended well. In the first few months of the year, battles with the gatekeepers at Trove sent me spiralling into a pretty dark place. But by year’s end I was having fun, working with the wonderful people at the State Library of Victoria. In between I caught up on some overdue project maintenance. Most of this is documented in the 37 blog posts I wrote this year, but here’s a quick summary.

Highlights

• From September to December, I was Creative Technologist-in-Residence at the SLV LAB, exploring ways of opening up the Library’s place-based collections. There’s still a few things to finish off, but here’s list of the results so far.
• As part of my SLV work, I created a fully searchable version of the 24 volumes of Sands & MacDougall directories digitised by the Library. This followed the pattern I’d used for 54 volumes of the NSW Post Office Directories, 44 volumes of the Sydney Telephone Directories, and 54 volumes of the Tasmanian Post Office Directories. So there’s now 176 volumes from the 1880s to the 1950s that can be easily explored for people and places— and all free to use of course.
• In April, I added a new section to the GLAM Workbench documenting the Public Record Office Victoria’s collection API. I also used the API to create a Data Dashboard that provides an overview of PROV’s collection.
• Also in April, I updated the GLAM Name Index Search to include an additional 6 million records from PROV. In total, the GLAM Name Index now includes more that 12 million records in 293 datasets from 10 Australian GLAM organisations — another free resource for Australian researchers.
• In July I undertook some overdue maintenance on a variety of old apps and projects. In the process, I resurrected my old Wragge Labs domain and created a showcase of many of the websites, apps and experiments I’ve worked on over the past 30 years.
• I was particularly pleased to get The Future of the Past working again, so once more you can create fridge magnet poetry from an odd collection of words harvested from Trove newspapers! I built FOTP back in 2012 when I was the Harold White Fellow at the NLA. Also this year I finally got around to transcribing my Harold White Lecture.
• In June I wrote a short piece on the GLAM Workbench for the forthcoming publication Building User-Friendly Toolkits and Platforms for Digital Humanities. I think it provides a useful summary of what the GLAM Workbench is, and what I’d like it to be. I also wrote up the short but glorious history of Trove Twitter bots.

Lowlights

• Saying goodbye to 15 years of work on Trove. It still hurts. And I still miss resources such as @TroveNewsBot and the Trove API Console which ran happily for more than a decade before being killed without warning by the NLA.
• Saying goodbye to 17 years of work on the National Archives of Australia’s collections. This will be the first New Year’s Day in a decade when I haven’t updated my harvest of files with the access status of closed.

Next year

• In 2026, I’m looking forward to starting work on the RAPID project, building on the work I’ve done on Commonwealth Hansard over the years to create new examples and documentation.
• I’m honoured to be giving the closing keynote at the GLAM Labs Futures conference in Edinburgh in June — hoping we can pull together the funds to get there in person!

How you can help

Much of my work is unfunded, and keeping resources such as the GLAM Name Index running costs real money. I’ve been very grateful for the support of my GitHub sponsors over past years. Their contributions help cover a substantial proportion of my cloud hosting costs. But bidding farewell to Twitter and Trove has had an impact on my sponsorship income. If you use or value the things I build to help researchers make use of GLAM collections, you might like to sponsor me on GitHub, or Buy Me a Coffee. All contributions are greatly appreciated!

If you can’t afford a financial contribution, there are other ways you can help!

• Let me know how you’re using my stuff! A bit of positive feedback does wonders when my enthusiasm is flagging. You can find my contact details at timsherratt.au.
• Tell others how you use my stuff! Getting information about resources out to those who might benefit is really hard, so your help would be greatly appreciated.
• The GLAM Workbench describes a few other ways you can get involved.

Goodbye 2025!