Bringing the National Museum of African American History and Culture to the world

 “As you go through the history, the higher you get, the feeling of lightness should come about because you see some of the progress being made in the African American story,” Foster says.

The technology behind the Searchable Museum

The Searchable Museum runs on Amazon Web Services and uses APIs created by the Smithsonian IT team to access all the metadata available in the massive catalog of artifacts, images, video clips, 3D objects, and other components that reside within the 11 inaugural exhibitions in the building.

Fearless designers also employed unique technologies to ensure viewers have a speedy, rich experience regardless of the device they use. Many of these technologies are time-tested frameworks and tools that don’t get a lot of publicity but are known platforms that have evolved and aged well. Fearless chose Gatsby, a JavaScript framework for fast web page creation, and Craft CMS, which provides a speedy yet robust reach into the museum’s sizable catalog of metadata stored in AWS S3.

The Gatsby static-site generator scaffolds the front end of the website, enabling developers to build ultrafast web page rendering, while the headless CMS fetches and renders the metadata stored in the back-end cloud systems at high speeds.

“Gatsby takes all that processing that used to happen in real-time and runs the processing before the website is deployed,” says Smith, of Fearless, about the pre-rendering framework. “I advocated for its use with React instead of JavaScript because of my experience working with the Small Business Administration. I learned with Gatsby how clever it is and how it allows for a very, very, very fast web experience … and those speed gains are important for an image-heavy website.”

Smith also notes that the Smithsonian’s APIs provide access to 3D images in various resolutions that are immensely helpful for the curators designing the content and to the IT experts delivering on their vision. “Technology doesn’t need to be super complex to get the job done,” Smith says.

The Searchable Museum continues adding compelling content such as a special exhibit on Afrofuturism in March and its technology partners are exploring technologies such as geofencing, which will allow students to play games and learn along the way. But the most important aspect of the Searchable Museum, all say, is accessibility — and Fearless deployed unique, not bleeding-edge technologies to deliver on that dream.

“Technology doesn’t need to be super complex to get the job done,” Smith says.