Archipelago Commons: healthy and hearty soups (and pastries) from the community kitchen

Archipelago Commons, is an open source repository platform developed and supported by the Digital Services Team at the Metropolitan New York Library Council. We support over 30 deployments in the United States and internationally, as well as the wider community of self or vendor managed implementations at libraries, archives, and museums. Created in 2018, Archipelago has achieved a steady, healthy maturity with 8 major releases since its first public version in 2019, paired with a stable development roadmap. Our platform consists of slim, innovative custom-coded Drupal modules, a curated list of trusted community built software, custom service containers and well documented zero-to-production deployment strategies. Archipelago features a flexible open-schema metadata approach, dynamic and on-the-fly schema transformations and deep IIIF API integrations supported by a vast and ever growing variety of Media and data viewers. Our 2025 focus was on improved discovery, better date processing math, UI vector integration for semantic search and ML-assisted cataloging and clustering, new batch ingest and background processing options, and also out-of-the box AI/ML bot harvest mitigation tools. Our presentation will focus on community favorite features, lessons learned and our future roadmap.