Recent Posts

If you take a look around you might notice that our blog looks pretty different. We’ve migrated to a completely different platform, and we took the opportunity to make some changes to bring the site more in line with our current systems philosophy and modern web design. The RAC has changed a lot since Bits & Bytes first launched, and we thought that the blog should reflect those changes. This post will lay out the reasons we decided to switch things up, the process of migrating the data, some of the technical improvements under the hood, and where we go from here.

As we’ve continued to refine Aurora’s functionality, and improve the application’s usability and accessibility, we’ve also been building out microservices applications which integrate a number of systems, moving digital records and data between them. Systems integrations work is not new to us at the RAC, but the integrations we are building for Project Electron are extremely mission critical. Because of that, they need to be reliable, scalable, holistically managed, modular, visible to and owned by staff at all levels of expertise. We also want them to automate routine and repetitive tasks, while supporting the value and dignity of archival labor by keeping human judgement and principled decision-making in the loop.

Below is a talk that Bonnie, Patrick and Hannah gave at the 2018 NDSA Digital Preservation Conference in Las Vegas. It has been edited slightly for the blog format. Our slides are available online.

Following our usability testing of Aurora, we undertook an accessibility audit of the application, testing it against the Section 508 and WCAG 2.0 standards and identifying issues. We then made changes to the application and provided recommendations for future improvements. This audit also gave us a chance to reflect more broadly on our approach to accessibility and how we can incorporate universal design concepts into our work at the RAC.

Following our initial release of Aurora, we’ve continued to improve the application through usability testing with RAC staff members. This process has been essential in identifying usability issues in Aurora and guiding our strategy to implement fixes to address those issues. In this post, I want to share our approach to usability testing, a summary of our findings and fixes, and our next steps.