The New York Historical —
Giving New York’s oldest museum a future-proof library
Curriculum Library / Platform
the ask
Turn the next exhibit into a framework for every exhibit
For more than twenty years, The New York Historical has paired its exhibitions with free digital curricula for K–12 teachers. When an exhibit closes, the curriculum is what lives on, in classrooms. But each one was built on its own, so the collection grew into a shelf of standalone microsites and PDFs that never connected.
Fresh off our redesign of Women & the American Story, the education team asked us to rethink the organization’s flagship Curriculum Library. The team needed one home for every curriculum, past and future. It had to be a teachers-first resource, while still serving the researchers, grad students, and curious readers who come for the history.
Services
the insight
History can only make an impact if it reaches the classroom
Teachers judge online material by how quickly they can get it in front of students. Some send a link. Some project it for the room. Some print it and pass it out. The old curriculum pages made every one of those methods harder. A single topic page stacked half a dozen resources, each with its own vocabulary and questions. Send students the link, and the lesson started with “keep scrolling.” The resources were rigorous, but getting them into a lesson took too much work.
the solution
History that goes to school
We started with the content. Every curriculum, old or new, was made of the same pieces: primary sources, life stories, essays, and classroom activities. We turned those pieces into one system, with a clear path from a full curriculum down to a single artifact, and gave every resource its own page so teachers can take exactly what they need.
New curricula fit in from day one. Legacy guides move over when the team has the capacity, and look like they always belonged. Researchers and curious readers get the same depth teachers do. And everything on the site was designed to work just as well printed and passed out as it does on a screen.
Designed to jump start exploration, curriculum guides contain all the needed in-class materials
A clear structure guides teachers and students deeper into each story, all the way to the people who lived it
Content made accessible to students at every knowledge and reading level
A delightfully simple print editor
to ensure resources are classroom-ready
Guidance for the hard conversations, handled with the same care as the exhibitions themselves
