Archivist — tools for archiving and exploring

Archivist is a set of tools for archiving and exploring of reference materials.

I spend a lot of time gathering resources and lateral thinking material. Over the years I noticed that stuff tends to disappear from the web, both the original content, and services used to collect it.

Archivist fetches local copies of the source images and frozen copies of the websites, so things wont get lost. I'm trading my local disk space for feeling safe that the content stays with me.

This work was partially prompted by local-first ideas from Ink&Switch.

There's no UI except for the content, and no interaction except for scrolling and searching.

Code is open sourced: szymonkaliski/Archivist.

End of 2020
  • Archivist — which was technically made in 2019, is something I use a lot, I recently added a way to search through screenshots I take (using OCR) and this had a huge impact on how I collect things, I should probably share an update about it soon
Q3 2021

These materials are important for my work, and I was worried that since online services tend to change and disappear over time, I might will lose them sooner or later, so a while ago I built a tool for backing all of this up called Archivist.

One problem with the original UI to Archivist is that there's no way to see everything, all at once. I can either scroll and see a couple of images at the same time, or remember the right phrase to search for — this is the main difference of Browsing vs Searching.

I wanted to browse my Archivist collections.

Archivist Browser (obviously I'm terrible at naming) is a way to browse Archivist collection using the UMAP embedding combined with a high-performance UI.

  • Understanding UMAP — which was very helpful for the Archivist Browser project presented above
Ideating-Authoring
  • a bigger topic on where ideas come from, related to keeping reference materials (Archivist, Commonplace book)
Memex Dreams

Some things are migrated to be stored as reference materials, articles end up in pinboard, and images/gifs/short videos in pinterest. I then archive those archives in Archivist so I can be sure I won't lose them even if the online services stop working.