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Author Cary Reich published one volume of a biography on Nelson Rockefeller, The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller: Worlds to Conquer, 1908-1958 (Doubleday, 1996). The Rockefeller Archive Center was gifted 564 audio cassettes that contain all of the interviews Reich conducted, including recordings with the likes of Donald Rumsfeld, Henry Kissinger, and former US President Gerald Ford. However, these tapes were poorly annotated which created identification, description, and access challenges.

As Hillel mentioned in his post about the next steps in Project Electron, we’re working on three data services for our pipelines into a new archival description interface: fetchers, transformers, and indexers. Once the fetchers grab data from a specific data source, we need the transformers to, for lack of a better word, transform that data from its original structure to a new one that fits with our proposed discovery data model before we index it for researcher access. But how do we ensure that the transformers are creating structured data that fits our data model as it’s defined? We need some sort of validation process to ensure the standardized structure of our data, which is why we’ve created a rough JSON schema that we can validate transformed data against before pushing it into our index.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the next phase of Project Electron, which is full of possibilities and challenges, and will involve the time and talents of the entire D-Team, as well as many of our RAC colleagues (I’m not going to recap that here; go read the post if you’re interested). However, while writing that post it occurred to me that Project Electron is only one part of the D-Team’s work, so I’ve summarized a number of other things we’re doing which may be relevant to the broader archival community below. Please get in touch if you’re working on similar initiatives, or if you have Opinions (good or bad) about what we’re up to!

This past summer, we ran a series of usability tests in order to gather and distill feedback from our coworkers about a redesigned interface we developed for the Rockefeller Archive Center’s Documentation Website. This blog entry continues a discussion I started in a previous post about our motivations, approach, and processes for redesigning the site in order to enhance user discovery and access. I will explain how we planned and carried out the usability tests in order to effectively evaluate the changes we have made to the platform, and I will reflect on my experience with conducting usability testing for the first time. By describing the fixes we have proposed in response to the issues identified during usability testing, I hope to create a picture of how the Documentation Site will appear when we finish development!

Last July, I wrote a blog post announcing the public release of the Rockefeller Archive Center’s Documentation Website as a platform for storing and sharing our institution’s documentation. Now, a little more than a year later, I am writing a new post to update our colleagues at the RAC and in the wider archives field about the work we have completed following the success of our efforts to make more content available. I will reflect on our motivations, approach, and processes for redesigning the site in order to enable improved discovery and access.