Recent Posts

Hillel, Ima, and Patrick all attended this years annual Code4Lib conference in Princeton, NJ. As always, the conference was well-programmed with many thoughtful presenters and presentations. Each of the authors came away with different insights about their work, current trends in the field, and new and thoughtful ways to to engage with their community of practice. Their reflections below offer a brief insight into the experience.

Hello! My name is Elizabeth Urbanczyk, and I am thrilled to join the Research and Engagement team here at the Rockefeller Archive Center as Writer. In this position, I’ll be diving into the RAC’s collections to produce content for our online publishing platform RE:source, among other responsibilities. I’m excited to collaborate across departments to develop relevant and valuable content for our public audiences.

I’m excited to share that we’ve finished implementing our open-source RAC Style Library, integrating its styles across our websites and refactoring our applications to align with the web components documented in our Storybook Style Guide. This project has already had a major impact on our ability to quickly, collaboratively, and sustainably develop and maintain user interfaces (UIs) that are accessible and facilitate better user experience (UX) by unifying our visual and experiential design across RAC websites.

In this final post about the project, I’d like to reflect on what we’ve learned and made possible with this work.

I’m pleased to announce the release of the Fluxx Exporter, an open-source tool that integrates with the grants management system Fluxx for the purposes of automating exports of select elements of grant records. Developed collaboratively by the Rockefeller Archive Center and Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, with support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Ford Foundation, the tool is built in Python on the Django web framework and uses the Fluxx API to export data from a configured instance. It can export both structured data that is entered into fields and stored in the database as well as files that are uploaded and attached to the grant record. This tool allows grants administrators, information managers, and archivists to select and export grant information for internal or external uses including for long-term preservation, researcher access, and organizational learning and evaluation.

The Rockefeller Archive Center’s Processing Team is building knowledge for the future of archival processing, specifically related to organizing, describing, and preserving incoming digital records. In 2023, we created the Digital Processing Collaborative (DPC) to help us think about what digital processing will look like at the RAC. The DPC is a working group led by the Processing Team with a mission to prioritize collaborative learning about born-digital records and digital processing activities. The group is responsible for working together to identify learning opportunities, future projects, and institutional goals related to digital processing.