Jason Heppler on Sustainable DH

"The Most [Undecipherable] Difficulties": Sustaining and Transcribing the Papers of the War Department

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 10:00:00 -0500

One of the most complicated websites RRCHNM has been sustaining in recent years is the Papers of the War Department (PWD), a crowdsourced transcription project to recover and make accessible the once-lost papers of the War Department whose offices burned to the ground in 1800. The project began with document collection and digitization efforts in the 1990s, but only became a website and an RRCHNM project two decades ago, in 2006.

Agents and APIs: Sustaining Projects by Rebuilding Them

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 10:00:00 -0500

RRCHNM has been in the business of producing digital history for over thirty years now, and because of this we have developed hundreds of projects on a variety of now-old web software and systems. Five years ago, when I joined RRCHNM, we decided to shift and consolidate our tech stack towards tools and software that would allow us a bit more creativity in the projects we were developing as well as provide easier ways to sustain projects over time. That resulted in a shift in our technical expertise, leading us to prefer the Python-based web framework Django or the static site generator Hugo for projects while reaching for WordPress, Drupal, and Omeka would be used sparingly.

Building Static Search

Wed, 20 Aug 2025 10:29:07 -0500

One of the nice features of a dynamic website—the kind of thing that’s often driven by databases—is the ability to run a search feature. Search is a feature across the various content management systems we use (or once used) at RRCHNM – Omeka, Drupal, and Wordpress. But once a site is flattened and no longer reliant on a database for serving content, the built-in ability of search goes away. For many of our sites, the loss of this feature can be dismaying to users. So, a goal this summer was to figure out a way to implement search on a static site.