Robotics oral-history archive
A public archive of oral-history interviews with the pioneers of a technical field.
NEEDS OWNER INPUT: client not named pending written permission.
An archive of recorded interviews with the people who built a technical field, alongside their profiles, a timeline of milestones, educator guides and publications. The audience is the public, researchers and teachers, which meant it had to be genuinely browsable rather than merely complete.
Deliberately no page builder
The proposal ruled out page-builder approaches from the start. Content in an archive is structured data, not layout, and burying it in builder markup makes it unusable the first time anyone wants to query it. The editor is restricted to a short list of blocks so staff never make layout decisions by accident.
Working within a sixty-second ceiling
The host caps every request at about a minute, which is far less than a migration of this size needs. So the importer runs on a wall-clock budget checked before every single file, and an interrupted job resumes exactly where it stopped rather than starting again. The whole import runs from one button, autonomously, with a progress display and a stop control.
Data archaeology
The legacy database held filenames that no longer pointed at anything, so authoritative media locations had to be recovered from the live pages instead. Institution names were being split into fictitious institutions by a naive comma rule. Video posters came from two incompatible naming schemes depending on when the video was published. None of this is visible in the finished archive.