Recent Posts

The Rockefeller Archive Center is taking steps to ensure that our actions align with the RAC statement in solidarity with the Black Community and our recent statement in solidarity with the Asian, Asian-American and Pacific Islander Community. Amy Berish, Darren Young, and myself, on behalf of the Processing team, organized an education campaign to help us and our colleagues learn more about cultural competency concepts and ultimately create more inclusive and respectful archival description.

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.