Hillel Arnold (Rockefeller Archive Center), has written a blog post, “Introducing staticAid: A Static Site Generator for Archival Description” that describes an approach to creating static web pages for archival finding aids using the ArchivesSpace REST API and Jekyll. He explains:
I’ve termed this a “thought exercise in code” since this was really a way for me to think out a number of concepts regarding static sites and archival description. It’s not a perfect solution, and there are a number of pretty significant holes (see “Caveats” below), but I think it does offer some intriguing possibilities for reconceptualizing systems for presenting archival description on the web.
staticAid, he notes, offers some of the advantages of static web pages in terms of speed, security and maintenance, and version control. The code for staticAid is available on GitHub for those who would like to experiment with this approach.
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