From Homegrown to State-of-the-Art: How the Lomax Digital Archive was Transformed — Easy to Search and Beautifully Displayed

The Association for Cultural Equity (ACE) is the custodian of the Alan Lomax Digital Archive. It
was founded by Alan Lomax, a musicologist, writer and producer who spent his life researching and promoting unrecorded and unrecognized music, dance, and oral traditions. ACE was registered as
a charitable organization in the State of New York in 1983 and is housed at New York City's Hunter College. ACE facilitates cultural equity through preservation, publication, and repatriation
of materials.

ACE houses more than 18,000 recordings within the Lomax Digital Archive. Their previous online database was built in-house. “The old archive was built by programmers, not designers, and it was built for functionality, which made it very difficult to navigate,” said Kiki Smith-Archiapatti, Interim Executive Director at ACE. “It was not mobile accessible, things that weren’t supposed to be downloadable were, and the search was very poor. You put in anything and everything came back.” Kiki also noted that it was poorly organized, the backend server continually crashed, and it was not secure. They knew they needed a more modern, intuitive system that was secure and user-friendly.

Kiki was tasked with finding a new digital archive platform and a partner to build and install it. “As a very small organization with just two people and without a lot of tech support, we were looking for something that would work for us and that I was able to manage on my own.”

After some research of similar online archives, Kiki landed on an Islandora system, built on Drupal, by Discovery Garden. “I selected Discovery Garden because of the really impressive client list and the flexibility of the Islandora system”, said Kiki. “Our digital archive is a huge resource for us. It’s the most forward-facing representation of our organization so it is very important that it works well and looks good. Having seen what was available with Islandora and Discovery Garden, I knew that even if we didn’t have a large budget for customization it would still look good and be very user-friendly.”

Their new LOMAX digital archive is everything Kiki had hoped for. “It looks a lot better, is much easier to search, fully accessible, and everything is cross-referenceable — which is a big deal for our discoverability.” Kiki was part of the launch of their original homegrown system and said that the upload of assets to Islandora was much smoother than when they did it with the old system.

For ACE, the primary benefit of Discovery Garden is their comprehensive knowledge of Islandora. “We would not have been able to set it up on our own. And continuing to have them as a backup or failsafe if I’m having an issue, is the main benefit for us. Anytime I have questions for tech support it’s usually addressed really quickly and satisfactorily.”

The new system also makes updates much easier. A seamless integration with Google Sheets enables any changes made to the sheet to automatically update the metadata within the archive.

“Working with Discovery Garden has been a very positive experience. They have a comprehensive knowledge of Islandora, everyone is very professional and prompt, works with me to find a solution, and works within my needs,” said Kiki.