Recent Posts

“Surely if you have nothing to look backward to and with pride, you have nothing to look forward to with hope.” – Barbara Craig

My time at the Rockefeller Archive Center has only emphasized my desire for preserving history. I came to the RAC with an interest in archival history and my personal goal to help build an archival center in my community of Spring Valley, New York. After reading What is Past is Prologue by Terry Cook, I realized as a community we do not have any spaces that honor our past, more accordingly the history of Blackness and people of color in our community. I remember days of block parties, outdoor sporting events, dance classes and, before my time, there was a village full of vibrancy and a sense of community. While that’s changing due to rapid gentrification, you can feel the memories of what once was, being forgotten.

As the RAC has increased the number of locally-developed applications used to manage our day-to-day work, the number of servers needed to run these applications has also increased, resulting in a large, complex server and application ecosystem. The IT and D-Teams have collaborated to share the maintenance load of our technological environment: we’ve implemented Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery mechanisms, automated application deployment as much as possible, and regularized communication channels. We’ve made great strides in operationalizing systems work that used to be time-consuming and difficult by developing in and deploying containerized applications. However, certain challenges remained that still made our work more difficult than it had to be.

We’re planning to transition from Google Universal Analytics to Matomo Analytics. This decision came out of a collaborative process, so we’re laying out the why and how in today’s post.

Throughout my internship experience at the Rockefeller Archive Center, I learned about the critical role that archives play in relation to educational storytelling. I was always drawn to storytelling and knew that video could be quite an impactful medium for engaging audiences with educational lessons. Learning how material is archived, preserved, and made accessible for researchers to build stories helped me see all the possibilities for myself to tell educational stories.

A while ago, I posted a general update laying out the major areas that the D-Team was working on. A bit over six months later, it seems like a good time to update on where our focus is now.