The National Archives Catalog is how the public finds and searches the National Archives and Records Administration(NARA) digitized historical records, 190 million digital objects in all. NARA recognized it was time to modernize the legacy system behind it, without losing the trust people place in it as an accurate, reliable record of the country's history.
Improving something used by the public at this scale meant more than a technical upgrade. Every gain in performance had to come without making a single record harder to find or a description less accurate.
The new Catalog's layout, search experience, and roadmap were all shaped by how people actually look for records, grounded in real research into who uses the archive and how.
The data model groups related information together and strips out what's irrelevant, turning a confusing search into a clear one. That same model also runs leaner, using less disk space and returning results faster.
NARA's team shifted from waterfall to a modified Scrum approach built specifically for their environment. That new way of working doesn't just belong to this Catalog, it's ready for the next NARA project team to pick up and move faster with.