Recent Posts

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.

As part of an effort to standardize Rockefeller Archive Center’s approach to the visual styles of our websites, we have recently developed a Sass style library and a RAC style guide to visualize website components and document best practices for their implementation. Based on the design treatments created for us by the design firm ondesign for DIMES and rockarch.org, this library and corresponding RAC style guide put us in a position to be able to unify the visual language of our websites and applications in a way that is maintainable, will improve future design processes, and is more accessible for users.

When launching a digital project, it might seem a bit morbid to plan for its eventual end. In the beginning, feelings of enthusiasm reign: the optimism of a blank canvas, the thrill of trying something new, the promise of new technologies, new methodologies, new answers, and new questions. But then maintenance demands resources, technology evolves, staff changes, new needs emerge, institutional processes and priorities shift, users and audiences develop new expectations. Projects run their course, and especially in the digital realm, we need to plan for this inevitability.

A project’s end doesn’t have to be morbid, though. In fact, planning for its afterlife ensures its longevity. Not erased, but documented, repurposed, built upon. This is a story about such an afterlife, a new era for a decade-long digital project once called The Rockefeller Foundation. A Digital History.

Over the past few months, I’ve been experimenting with our Collections API to explore its possibilities. Most recently, I’ve used it to create some visualizations which provide a visual avenue for exploration of collections, as well as that might not be possible simply from reading the description. Now that we have publicly launched the Collections API (along with some helpful documentation), I wanted to write about this project as an example of how the API provides some new ways of exploring the RAC’s collections.