It’s been an eventful year for the Archives Hub, so I thought I’d take this chance to select a few highlights.

Development work has been proceeding fast on the Spokes software. John Harrison (over in Liverpool), Jane and Steve have put a lot of energy into this and we’re also grateful to all the ‘early adopters’ who’ve given us so much useful feedback. I’m sure that 2007 will see widespread uptake of this software, which gives institutions a low-cost way of presenting their EAD files online. ELGAR is the Spoke installation at the John Rylands University Library here in Manchester, which has not been live for long, but which is already appearing in search engine results for searches on the names of John Rylands collections.

The Hub’s collections of the month have been brilliant this year: I think my favourite one was June’s look at Romanies and Gypsiologists, which is a great example of the way that services like the Archives Hub can bring together related collections from a range of archive-holding institutions. Thanks to Paddy for all the work that he does on this aspect of the service.

We’ve had a couple of interruptions to the Archives Hub’s service this year: a major power cut to Manchester Computing’s building in May and a hard disk failure in October. Steve ensured that the interruptions were as brief as possible!

We are a small team here, with five of us sharing an office, but all three of the men became fathers during 2006, so best wishes to all the new families for their first Christmas.

In the last week a complimentary review of the Archives Hub and other MIMAS services was published in the Guardian newspaper (scroll down the article to ‘The MIMAS Touch’), which was an excellent way to end the year.

We wish all our users, contributors and colleagues a happy Christmas and a fulfilling 2007.

The image is of the 2006 Archives Hub Christmas card, in case you didn’t get a hard copy version. Snowflakes were made using the Make a Flake site.