This website is built in Ruby on Rails on the Orchid framework developed by the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH). The search and item view is largely powered by Elasticsearch and the CDRH Apium project.
Metadata about items such as the footage clips, images, newspaper index, and more are stored as comma separated value documents (CSVs), a text alternative to spreadsheets. These are then transformed using the CDRH project Datura into Elasticsearch JSON and sometimes HTML for displaying purposes.
Images are served by Cantaloupe, a IIIF compatible image server.
The first release of the project was built with Middleman, a Ruby static site generator. This was done intentionally to create a static HTML site with minimal resources and maintenance requirements. The site was migrated to Ruby on Rails during 2020 when search capabilities and image server integration were needed to accommodate a larger amount of items.