Century Archives Association Foundation
Biographical Archive Filtering & Search
What the rebuild covered
I led the redesign of the Century Association Archives Foundation's (CAAF) public-facing site, and CABA, the Century Association Biographical Archive of 3,000+ member records spanning 1847 to 1922, with augmented filtering and search designed for scholarly use.
Multiple curated entry points
Every visitor to this member archive is searching the same few thousand records, but they rarely want the same thing. A casual visitor wants to recognize a famous name. Someone researching family history wants the club’s founders. A researcher wants the full, unfiltered list.
Building one search bar to serve all three would have served none of them well. So the archive opens with a few simple starting points: notable members, founders, full text search, everything.
Creating a network of biographies
Each person in this historical member archive has their own page. But almost every name mentioned on that page also belongs to someone else in the archive. Treating each page as a standalone biography missed something obvious: nobody joined alone, everyone was vouched for by someone already in the record.
So the archive treats it that way too: every name on a page links to that person’s own page. One record becomes a way into dozens of others, instead of a dead end.
Search filters built for research
The filters needed to match the way scholars actually researches a person: by name, by profession, by where they were born or died, and by a range of years rather than one year.
So the search tools include separate fields for each of those, with year fields that let you set a start and an end instead of a single date, allowing for enough precision to narrow thousands of records down.
Real archival material as part the design system
The site’s visual language comes directly from the archive it represents. These stills from the site show how real material from the archive—old photographs, illustrations, emblems—became part of the actual design system.
Outcomes
Shipped: the foundation site and CABA, live on WordPress.
Used by researchers working the 3,000+ member records, and maintained by one archivist with no design or development background.
New content arrives a few times a year and enters through existing patterns without a developer. CABA moved from five clicks deep to one.