Recent Posts

Back in June, the RAC released a statement in solidarity with the Black Community, and more recently a statement in solidarity with the Asian, Asian-American and Pacific Islander Community. For the rest of the summer, a few RAC staff members brainstormed ways we could turn these words into actionable change within our institution. We immediately saw the connection between cultural competency and archival description and decided to propose a “Culturally Competent (Re)description Campaign.”

One of the components of the new version of DIMES we haven’t written much about is our implementation of International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) APIs which support the display of digitized content. This post lays out how we implemented the IIIF Image and Presentation APIs, the decisions we made along the way, and what we learned from the process.

In late February I virtually attended the Designing For Digital conference, an annual event designed to “bring together UX professionals, web designers, managers, researchers, strategists and librarians of all types” to explore topics related to UX in libraries. Returning for the third year to this event, I’d like to reflect on topic trends I observed, and how I think these trends reflect the challenges and shifting contexts that library UX practitioners have faced this past year because of the impacts of COVID-19.

The recent launch of DIMES, the Rockefeller Archive Center’s (RAC) new system for archival discovery and delivery, is now a month behind us. Having now had a moment to breathe and reflect, I’d like to share some details about the RAC’s collaborative user experience (UX) research and testing strategies for this project, and how those strategies connect to our broader goal to operationalize user experience (UX) practice at the Rockefeller Archive Center.

We are excited to announce the launch of our new archival discovery system at the Rockefeller Archive Center. This next generation of DIMES - which we’ve been calling DIMES-TNG - is a major overhaul of both our public-facing website for searching archival collections and accessing digitized content, as well as its underlying infrastructure. The launch of this site marks the final major milestone for Project Electron, an RAC effort to build sustainable, user-centered, and standards-compliant infrastructure to support the ongoing acquisition, management, and preservation of archival digital records in order to make archival records available in the broadest and most equitable way possible. As the piece that focuses specifically on access, DIMES-TNG is the culmination of Project Electron.