Archive Buddy

Archive Buddy is a specialist workspace for archivists and people working with archival collections. It is a focused workspace for archival description, appraisal, preservation advice, access questions and other day-to-day archival work. It helps with practical drafting and planning while keeping professional review at the centre.

Built for archival judgement

Archive Buddy helps with practical drafting and planning while keeping professional review at the centre. It helps with the wording, while the archivist stays in charge of the facts and decisions.

What It Helps With

Draft and improve archival description
Prepare researcher responses and reference interviews
Review rights, privacy, sensitivity and access questions
Plan digitisation, preservation, outreach and archive administration
Scope and content notes
Outreach, teaching and public engagement
Archive administration, grant text and volunteer instructions

Professional focus

Prompting and workflows are framed around description, access, reference, preservation and appraisal.

Optional connectors

Optional connectors can support related workflows, such as calendar tasks, only when a user chooses to connect them.

Clear limits

Start with a small free allowance, then choose individual, professional or custom access as needed.

Why it exists

Generic chat tools can be useful, but archival work has particular expectations: provenance, original context, cautious handling of missing information, sensitivity around access, and outputs that fit professional workflows. Archive Buddy is built around those needs from the interface upward.

Product Principles

Designed around archival description, appraisal, access, preservation and reference work.

Helps with the wording while archivists stay in charge of the facts and decisions.

Intended to support professional judgement, not replace it.

Designed to grow toward institutional preferences, standards, retrieval and catalogue integrations.

Optional connected services

Archive Buddy can connect to supported external services when a user chooses to enable them. Calendar access is optional and used only for calendar features the user initiates, such as viewing upcoming events or creating events after confirmation. Full data-use details are in the Privacy Policy.