In today’s age of disinformation, having trusted sources of knowledge is more important than ever. That's why agencies like NARA are so critical. As the US government’s main record keeper, NARA is one of the most important information sources we have. Its National Archives Catalog (NAC) is home to millions of searchable electronic record. So, when NARA decided to overhaul NAC, Fearless jumped at the chance to support its tech modernization.
NAC enables any member of the public to browse NARA’s digitized records. Through it, users can find descriptions of over 95% of the agency's millions of records. To improve NAC's user experience, NARA turned to Fearless. We were asked to build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) NextGen Catalog to replace the legacy system.
But in our work creating the new Catalog, we’re not only supporting NARA’s tech modernization. We’re also supporting the agency’s overall digital transformation. We’ve introduced new agile, testing, and user research practices to the program. We've also placed a strong emphasis on modernization, scalability, and performance, alongside our dedication to accessibility, usability, and data quality. These practices help us ensure that the Catalog meets the needs of the people it serves. And in this way, we’re improving efficiencies and reducing risk for NARA.
On this project, one of our core goals has been to support NAC’s tech modernization. Most critically, we've worked to improve NAC's scalability, searching, performance, and user experience.
Given this, we knew getting a solid understanding of NARA’s ecosystem was going to be key. So, we kicked this project off with a discovery period. We researched NARA's users and technical landscape before building out solutions. Using this data, we defined the ideal user experience (UX), product vision, MVP scope, and roadmap.
As we were building the NextGen Catalog, we also coached our customer on agile practices. We knew that adopting new management styles can be daunting. So, we were careful to meet stakeholders where they were.
Communicating constantly, we worked to make stakeholders as comfortable as possible. We then introduced a modified Scrum methodology tailored to NARA’s environment. This iterative approach supported NARA’s tech modernization, while also minimizing risk. By running through rapid cycles of ideation, experimentation, and testing, we were able to quickly hone in on the best-fit solutions.
To support NARA’s testing efforts, we took advantage of Fearless’ Testing Dojo to embed an expert right on the team. This empowered the team to start testing early and often and to refine how they assessed quality.
To gain user insights, we hosted user interviews, user acceptance testing, and workshops. This continuous feedback helped ensure that users’ needs were constantly considered throughout development. It also supported better efficiency and effectiveness throughout NARA’s tech modernization. Because of it, we avoided wasting time building out features that wouldn’t work for users.
Our approach enabled us to quickly deliver working solutions to NARA. One of these solutions was a new data model, which provides a better flow of information. We grouped similar elements, identifying irrelevant ones and stripping them from the index. We also provided more context fields. And we made the transition from SQL to Opensearch, allowing for more robust and high-performance search capabilities.
We also streamlined the extract, transform, and load (ETL) process to accelerate the availability of digitized catalog items and their corresponding public contributions. And we executed a full site redesign, adhering to best practices in web design, development, and operations.
While these are just a few aspects of our tech modernization effort for NARA, they've had a big impact. Our work not only successfully addressed the maintenance and scalability challenges of the legacy infrastructure. It also significantly enhanced the catalog's accessibility, search, and overall experience. At the same time, it led to lower disk space usage, faster API responses, and better quality control. With these improvements, we’re helping ensure that the public can find, use, and learn from the historical artifacts NARA houses.