Durable Digital partnered with the Legal Defense Fund to create LDF Recollection: A Civil Rights Legal Archive, which enables LDF to preserve and make available to the public the legal history of the civil rights movement in the United States.
Business case
History
Legal Defense Fund's mission is to use the power of law, narrative, research, and people to defend the humanity and advance the rights of Black people in America. In doing so, it has played the leading role in the legal history of the civil rights movement in the United States. Its many victories in the United States Supreme Court, as well as in lower courts, have shaped American society for generations. The institution’s overall influence on the US civil rights movement cannot be overstated.
LDF has an extensive and exceptionally valuable collection of archival records (some of which reside in the United States Library of Congress) that chronicles the organization’s work since 1940.
Two challenges
The LDF Archives team was given a straightforward assignment: To make its archival records available to the public and help writers and researchers tell the stories behind those records. But to achieve it was anything but straightforward. The LDF Archives team faced two distinct challenges.
- The first, and by far the most daunting, was to address the monumental task of reviewing and categorizing millions of archival court documents, correspondence, photographs, and other records for public consumption. This includes digitizing over 9,200 linear feet of paper records and processing over 10 terabytes of “born digital” records.
- The second challenge was to create a website that not only presents these archival records, allowing them to be easily searched and downloaded, but also provides context through compelling narratives, oral histories, and educational resources.
Our solution
LDF Recollection
The centerpiece of this effort is the LDF Recollection website. We designed the website with four distinct but interconnected sections.
- The Learn section offers a comprehensive timeline of key milestones in LDF history since 1940, along with educational resources for teachers.
- Stories features editorial narratives that connect historical legal battles to contemporary civil rights issues, enriched with archival imagery and documents.
- The Oral Histories section presents first-person accounts from civil rights attorneys, activists, and leaders who worked with the LDF.
- The Archives section delivers powerful search and discovery tools for exploring LDF’s archival collections of documents, photographs, and historical materials. The search functionality is very robust, enabling users to combine metadata through faceted search, making decades of civil rights legal history accessible with just a few clicks.
In-depth, engaging narrative content and robust search functionality help visitors discover the legal history of the U.S. civil rights movement.
Technology
We developed LDF Recollection on the Umbraco CMS. The website is hosted in Azure and powered by two external systems:
- Preservica, the leading digital preservation system, maintains archival records and a subset of metadata relevant to the website. This was the first time Preservica was integrated with a public-facing website.
- The archives team uses Microsoft Dynamics 365 to manage every aspect of their archival processes, including a vast amount of metadata, workflow, archival object processing, audit trail, and security. Dynamics is also connected to Azure Blob Storage. To learn more about the solution, read our case study, “Leveraging Dynamics 365 and Preservica to lower the cost of archives digitization.”
Enterprise-scale architecture
To connect Umbraco, Dynamics 365, Preservica, and Azure storage, we developed a Controller API that serves as a central hub for these systems. This API enables automated workflows, data synchronization, content delivery, and cross-platform storage browsing—all supported by a multi-layered security model.
The website infrastructure is load-balanced and auto-scales with demand, with custom profiling through Application Insights ensuring consistent performance.
Seamless content management for storytelling
We extended Umbraco’s media library to support multiple file systems simultaneously, allowing content editors to select media items from Preservica and other sources when creating editorial content. In the Umbraco backoffice, front-end components are rendered beautifully for editors with real-time updates, even pulling in live archival materials to create a fully interactive content creation experience. This makes writing engaging stories with historical imagery and case notes intuitive and accessible for even those without traditional content editor backgrounds, enabling LDF staff to craft compelling narratives quickly and easily.
Archival items stored in Preservica can be viewed from the Umbraco backoffice.
Results
The LDF Archives team and Durable received significant recognition for this work in 2025.
- LDF Recollection was one of three websites shortlisted for the most prestigious “Jury's Choice Award” at the international Umbraco Awards, competing against over 200 submissions. Watch our video demonstrating the solution.
- The LDF Archives team received the Archival Innovator Award from the Society of American Archivists (SAA), which recognizes “…the greatest overall current impact on the profession or their communities.”
“We’re thrilled with the LDF Recollection website and the work that Durable Digital is doing to help us advance our mission and communicate LDF’s pivotal role in the legal history of the civil rights movement in the United States.”
Karla McKanders
Director of the Thurgood Marshall Institute at LDF
