Ashton Wingate, Senior Manager of Digital Archives at the Legal Defense Fund (LDF), along with Durable Digital’s Managing Partner, Peter Gassiraro, took the stage at the 2025 Preservica North American User Conference on 24 June 2025. Immediately following the keynote address they presented a session titled “Safeguarding Civil Rights History.”
They shared the story behind LDF Recollection, a groundbreaking digital archive and storytelling website developed for the Legal Defense Fund’s Thurgood Marshall Institute. The website was shortlisted for the Jury's Choice Award at the 2025 Umbraco Awards. The talk explored how LDF and Durable Digital partnered, with support from Preservica, to make decades of civil rights legal history accessible, secure, and searchable.
The talk covered challenges, lessons learned, and the outcome of:
- How the project supported LDF’s Archives Department to collect and preserve LDF’s historical records and make them accessible to LDF staff and the public
- Establishing and scaling an archive to a very large backlog, complex security requirements, and public accessibility
- Designing and implementing a custom Microsoft Dynamics 365 solution to automate LDF's digitization workflow, handle archival records, and manage vast amounts of metadata
- The first-ever integration of Preservica with the Umbraco CMS to present digital archives to the public and responsibly share archival content
The talk also addressed LDF’s next steps in its historical preservation journey, including born-digital records, the next phases of its oral history project, making audio and visual records available to the public, and using artificial intelligence to enhance metadata.
For a related case study, please read, Leveraging Dynamics 365 and Preservica to lower the cost of archives digitization.