Carnegie Hall Archives Story

HOW ORANGE LOGIC AND CARNEGIE HALL WORK TOGETHER

CARNEGIE HALL ARCHIVES STORY

The iconic New York venue created an engaging public portal to share part of its 400+ terabyte archive, achieving visitor bounce rates far better than industry benchmarks.

Archiving the history of Carnegie Hall

Artists from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky to Billie Holiday, the Beatles to Jay-Z, have performed at Carnegie Hall, and figures like Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Martin Luther King, Jr. have graced its stages. The Hall established its archives in 1986 and began digitizing collections in 2012, needing a DAM that could manage both current content and historical material.

The goal

The Susan W. Rose Archives were founded to share the Hall’s history with the world, and the archivists planned a public Digital Collections website for history lovers, journalists, filmmakers, and staff.

“There's no reason why these materials need to be locked away somewhere. They should be out in the world. They should be used and studied and explored, and enjoyed, too.”
— Kathryn Gronsbell, Digital Collections Manager, Carnegie Hall

The challenge

Carnegie Hall needed complex permissions to separate assets it could share publicly from those with rights restrictions, and a public space with curated, easy-to-search selections for visitors with little technical know-how.

The solution

Securely manage assets: Intuitive permissions let admins control access and downloads themselves.

Collaborate with other departments: Internal Digital Collections made it easier for teams like social media and marketing to find historic content.

Create a public face for the archives: Orange Logic worked with the Hall on an on-brand template, so the public site launched with fewer outside resources.

The results

Visitors spend twice as much time on archive pages as on the main Carnegie Hall site, and the Digital Collections have a bounce rate of just 7%, compared to an industry benchmark of about 57%.

When COVID-19 struck, the Digital Collections helped remote staff find ready-for-social content, and archival materials featured heavily in the Hall’s virtual opening night.

“Our ability to share all of our archival collection and our current material with staff from home has been a priceless opportunity.”
— Kathryn Gronsbell, Carnegie Hall

Lessons learned

Get users invested in your DAM. Trained staff became the archivists’ best advocates, uploading, tagging, and testing.

Keep putting in the time. Years of digitizing and organizing paid off when the pandemic hit.