ArchiveLens: A Personal, Searchable Wiki for Every Text You Have Ever Written

ArchiveLens is a lightweight local tool that turns a journalist’s or content creator’s scattered archive of text files into a searchable wiki that runs in their own browser. Every five minutes, it scans a chosen folder, such as a Nextcloud directory, and automatically converts new or changed documents from the Open Document Format (ODT) into Markdown. It then presents all content in a clean wiki interface, organized by folder and showing each file name together with its date, so users can instantly see how current a piece of content is. Its full-text search makes it easy to find a specific quote, figure or passage in seconds, and it is considerably faster than the built-in search of any operating system. ArchiveLens is particularly suitable for freelance journalists, writers and small editorial teams with large archives that have grown over many years. Because everything runs locally, no cloud service or account is required. To test ArchiveLens, we can set it up for a small group of freelance journalists and ask them to track how quickly they find quotes and background material compared with their usual search methods.