Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust Archive

To make change, social movements must understand their past. Only by learning from the past can we be inspired by previous struggles, avoid mistakes and rejoin long abandoned pathways to liberation and justice.

We were thrilled to help the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust build a new version of their online archive. The archive contains almost 70 years of radical writing, including writings by Stuart Hall and E.P. and Dorothy Thompson.

Titles like Red Rag illustrate the richness of feminist history. Race & Class considers the complex interaction of these forms of oppression. Black Dwarf writes from the heady days of the late 1960s. The whole archive of the influential Marxism Today considers how theories of political and social change adapt to how society itself has changed – the often controversial 'New Times' hypothesis.

A fresh, clear and lightweight design and a new technology stack bring the archive into the 21st century. The design centres the vibrant cover art across the collection and this new technology provides search tools that now allow organisers and researchers to explore the work in detail.

We used:

• Django
• Wagtail with React PDF Viewer
• A PostgreSQL native search interface that injested and indexed achive PDFs as they were uploaded

Using PostgreSQL directly limited technical complexity of the site and the cost of hosting cost.

The source code of the archive is open source to allow other archives to build upon the work.