Recent Posts Page 16

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.

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.