There will, no doubt, be certain jobs and industries that will be dramatically impacted by artificial intelligence (AI). However, that can be said about virtually any technological innovation introduced in the past 30 years. A more interesting question might be, “How does the hype surrounding AI affect my career today?”

In discussions with our archives clients, we often hear this: “I’m using a system that an old colleague built for me and it doesn’t work well. There’s no documentation, and the guy who built it is no longer with our organization.” Why is this a problem? Let us count the ways.

The Arizona State Archives collects and preserves permanent public records, historical manuscripts, photographs and other materials that contribute to the understanding of Arizona history. With six professionals overseeing their many collections of government materials, private manuscript collections, oral histories and photos, documenting everything and making it accessible is a huge challenge. With CuadraSTAR SKCA (STAR Knowledge Center for Archives), their collections are now more visible and available than ever before.

Baylor University is a private Christian university and nationally ranked research institution in Texas with more than 16,000 students, and multiple libraries and archives maintained by approximately 30 staff members. They have achieved significant impact using Star Knowledge Center for Archives (SKCA) to manage their collections.

Does your organization’s mobile website lack the punch of your desktop version?

“Today, most people are searching on Google using a mobile device. However, our ranking systems still typically look at the desktop version of a page’s content to evaluate its relevance to the user. This can cause issues when the mobile page has less content than the desktop page because our algorithms are not evaluating the actual page that is seen by a mobile searcher.”
–Google Webmaster Central Blog, Mobile-first Indexing, November 4th, 2016

As part of its new mobile-first strategy, Google will give preferential search rankings to “mobile-friendly" sites (sites optimized for mobile devices). This change will have a significant impact on search results.

This is the second of a two-part blog post describing how the right archiving software can address H. Thomas Hickerson’s Ten Challenges for the Archival Profession. In Part 1, we covered the first five challenges, on topics such as accommodating documents generated in electronic form, supporting global access, and making holdings more accessible while expanding the audience. Read on for more archiving challenges and technological solutions.

H. Thomas Hickerson, in his turn of the 21st century address to the Society of American Archivists, described “Ten Challenges for the Archival Profession”. Since his presentation, information technology has achieved significant advancements that empower archivists seeking to address these goals.

This is the third in a series of posts on IT and the information Professional. When I chat with information professionals and IT managers about open source software, they often talk about two key concepts:

• It’s free
• Bug fixes and enhancements come from the community

While both of these statements are true, they fail to paint the whole picture and hide some pretty ugly truths.

In my last post, I discussed the unfortunate fact that many information professionals find themselves at the bottom of the IT totem pole, and thus they receive underwhelming IT support as they attempt to build and manage world class knowledge/library systems, or special collections.

So what’s an information professional to do? Knowledge and library systems are complex pieces of technology that require IT involvement at some level. Over my career, I have observed that in departments having the best relationship with IT, the information professionals practice what I call "IT Jujutsu."

All our software is developed on a platform we call LucideaCore, with the key advantage that enhancements made for one Lucidea product can be easily leveraged with others, keeping costs down and speeding deployment. We recently launched a project to make our software more accessible to people with disabilities. By virtue of our platform-based approach to developing KM solutions, related new capabilities will soon be incorporated into all LucideaCore products.