Recent Posts

This past summer, we ran a series of usability tests in order to gather and distill feedback from our coworkers about a redesigned interface we developed for the Rockefeller Archive Center’s Documentation Website. This blog entry continues a discussion I started in a previous post about our motivations, approach, and processes for redesigning the site in order to enhance user discovery and access. I will explain how we planned and carried out the usability tests in order to effectively evaluate the changes we have made to the platform, and I will reflect on my experience with conducting usability testing for the first time. By describing the fixes we have proposed in response to the issues identified during usability testing, I hope to create a picture of how the Documentation Site will appear when we finish development!

Last July, I wrote a blog post announcing the public release of the Rockefeller Archive Center’s Documentation Website as a platform for storing and sharing our institution’s documentation. Now, a little more than a year later, I am writing a new post to update our colleagues at the RAC and in the wider archives field about the work we have completed following the success of our efforts to make more content available. I will reflect on our motivations, approach, and processes for redesigning the site in order to enable improved discovery and access.

After Bonnie’s post reporting back on her SAA experience this year, I also wanted to share some things I learned from the conference. It’s been a few weeks now, so I’ll focus on two sessions that I’m still thinking through in relation to my own work related to accessibility and disability in archives. These were the popup session “Where Are We? The State of Accessibility in Archives”, particularly Hannah Rosen’s report on the 2019 Lyrasis Accessibility Survey, and the working group session “Neurodiversity in Archives” led by Eric Hung, Lydia Tang, Chris Tanguay, and Zachary Tumlin.

This month, we are pleased to announce that we have successfully transferred, validated, appraised, and accessioned digital records from the Ford Foundation using the Project Electron infrastructure. We plan to onboard more donor organizations over the next year. With Aurora and the associated Project Electron systems now receiving digital records, we’ve reached a major milestone for this project and for the Rockefeller Archive Center as we expand our capabilities as an archival repository and research center.

As Hannah indicated in her last blog post, we’ve been thinking a lot about the next phase of Project Electron which, broadly speaking, looks at how researchers (and other user communities) find and get access to all the great digital records we’ll be transferring from our donor organizations.

As with the rest of this project, we want to be conscious of existing tools and practices so we can build on what’s working well and try to improve what isn’t. This is a major reason we started by reviewing our personas and user stories. Hannah’s blog post does a great job of summarizing what we learned during that process, and I won’t repeat all of that here, other than to say that the challenges faced by our users in finding and accessing archival records need to be addressed holistically. In other words, considering access to digital records separately from access to physical records is akin to looking only at part of a large picture; on the other hand, considering user needs across formats is a useful way for us to focus on the qualities of the user experience we hope to provide for our researchers.