Recent Posts

I recently attended Designing for Digital in Austin, a conference that brings together UX professionals and strategists from libraries and library-adjacent institutions. I shared a talk on strategies for operationalizing UX, giving some project-based examples from the work we’ve done at the RAC. I’ll be reporting more on this work in future posts, particularly as it relates to our design and development of a new archival discovery system as part of Project Electron. However, in this post I’d like to share some highlights from other talks at Designing for Digital 2020 that connect to our UX work at the RAC, including topics related to accessibility auditing, measuring UX maturity, and a resource to support usability testing. I want to note that this conference occurred as COVID-19 cases were first being detected in the United States, and while the conference was still held in-person, many folks also participated and presented remotely, and many of the conference slides are available online.

In late 2014, the RAC migrated from Archivist’s Toolkit to ArchivesSpace. Shortly thereafter, we started working with ArchivesSpace’s API by writing scripts, mostly in Python, to export EAD, produce reports, and otherwise help to manage archival description at scale. After use, they were filed away in a GitHub repository, which over time became a sort of junk drawer.

Flash forward to the end of 2019. While we’re still using the ArchivesSpace API, a lot of other things have changed. Our coding chops, both individually and collectively, have improved dramatically thanks to several years of sustained engagement with Project Electron development work. We’ve also helped to seed the development of efforts like ArchivesSnake, which took all of the disparate code archivists had written to interact with the ArchivesSpace API and combined the best of it into a single Python package. It was time, we thought, to open up the junk drawer and see if there was anything worth saving.

Last week I attended the #a11yTO Conf in Toronto. #a11yTO promotes digital inclusion for the design and development communities in the Toronto area, and the conference brings together accessibility experts and disability advocates from around the world to present on topics ranging from legal strategy, standards, and values to more technical talks on design and web development.

Back in August, Hillel shared a post describing the next phase of Project Electron, which focuses on enabling users to find and access our archival records. In my role as an archivist who thinks about UX design and usability, I’ve been looking at how we might improve and reimagine the user experience of archival discovery at the RAC in ways that leverage our data model and data services work and represent what we’ve learned from our user research. In this post I’ll share our first steps in thinking through a user-facing site for archival discovery through creating wireframes, conducting some participatory site mapping activities with our staff, and looking at how other archives are approaching discovery.

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.