Stanford's King Institute Documents Search Engine

In 2016, Andornot had the pleasure of working with the King Institute at Stanford University on their archival database of tens of thousands of speeches, sermons, letters, and other documents by and about Martin Luther King, Jr.

Known as OKRA (Online King Records Access), the database includes descriptive information as well as holdings details for these resources held at repositories all over the United States.

In that first project, we conducted a major rebuild of their DB/TextWorks-based databases to make it more usable by staff and students at the Institute.

In 2017, we were able to upgrade the web-based search interface for this resource with one built from our Andornot Discovery Interface. And then again in 2023, upgraded the site to the latest version of this popular tool, adding even more search features to the site.

The new search interface is available at https://okra.stanford.edu and offers researchers features that will greatly help their work, such as:

• type-ahead suggestions of names, places and topics as a user starts a search;
• spelling corrections and search suggestions;
• a sophisticated search engine that presents the most relevant results first (with an option to re-sort by title or date);
• facets to easily refine a search by name, place, topic, date and other aspects of the data;
• handy tools for saving and bookmarking records, emailing them, or sharing them on social media; and
• an advanced search form for constructing highly specific searches, or for simply browsing all available names, topics, places and other key indexes of the data.

The new search engine adopts the same layout and design as the main King Institute website, for a seamless transition between the two.

Contact Andornot for data management and search solutions similar to this one.