How do you manage a musical archive with 75,000+ tracks, complex metadata, and a mission to keep every recording available forever? For Smithsonian Folkways, the answer began over a decade ago with Orchard 1.x, and today runs on a fully customized Orchard Core platform.

Smithsonian Folkways is the nonprofit record label of the U.S. national museum system — a digital home for musical traditions from across the globe. When their team first needed a scalable, flexible platform, Toby Dodds, Director of Technology, was referred to Lombiq by a fellow Orchard community member to help build it.

We talked to Toby about how their platform evolved over the years, what made Orchard the right long-term choice, and what others might learn from building and running something this complex and essential.

– Toby, can you give us a quick overview of what Folkways does, and why managing the platform is such a complex technical challenge?

Toby: Smithsonian Folkways Recordings is a record label based within the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

It was founded in 1987 when the Smithsonian acquired Folkways Records, with a promise to keep the entire catalog in print in perpetuity. It had over 2,000 titles back then.

Today, it features closer to 4,000 releases with around 75,000 tracks of audio. The recordings in the collection are historic and diverse, with a strong emphasis on musical traditions from around the world.

Keeping this catalog of high-value material in print — both physically and digitally — requires a powerful website and a capable CMS to support it.

– So back when you were first planning the site, what made you go with Orchard? What were you looking for that led you there?

Toby: To meet our mission of keeping our catalog in print, we knew we needed a website capable of giving users access to our catalog with working search and many thousands of pages that feature rich media.

We also knew we would have to store complex metadata to make the website and our operation function.

When CMS technologies were emerging, we reviewed many projects but concluded that the Orchard CMS would best fit our needs.

Building on ASP.NET has always felt like a steady and reliable option for us — it allowed us to do powerful things without too much cost and on a reasonable upgrade path.

We liked the transparency and size of the Orchard community because it gave us easy access to it. Fundamentally though, Orchard was best because we would be able to design our own architecture within it without painful compromises.

– You’ve been on Orchard for a long time now. What made you stick with it when moving to Orchard Core, instead of switching to something else?

Toby: Preserving control over our collection, and executing our mission, superseded any other concerns about platform selections we’ve faced.

Our website is unique in its requirements, and we couldn’t be happier with our choice of Orchard Core.

Our CMS is not just a web-publishing platform — it’s evolved to become our collection manager. From content management to collection management — which for a museum-based organization is an important distinction.

Our ability to house collection records securely within Orchard and immediately make them available to the public via our website hits a very sweet spot for us.

– What were the biggest improvements or benefits you noticed after moving to Orchard Core?

Toby: Speed was the biggest upgrade we felt in transition to Core.

But along the way we solved a slew of big problems and were able to roll out new capabilities — including offering streaming of our catalog directly to our users.

We were also able to massively improve our search and browsing interfaces by leveraging the indexing architecture at the core of Core.

– And how did the new system change the way your team works day to day?

Toby: Working step-by-step, we have continued to add new capabilities to our Orchard Core implementation and are strengthening the role it plays in our organization.

Recently we added Audit Trail capabilities, for example, to make it possible to safely share the collection management project with a wider group.

– Sounds like it’s really grown into more than just a CMS. What kind of role does it play today?

Toby: We have branded our Orchard Core implementation with the name FCM, which stands for Folkways Collection Manager, and it is our system of truth for our collection.

It is at the center of nearly everything we do related to maintaining our catalog as a business and as an educational archival project.

We interact with it in too many ways to list, but there is no limit to the powerful things we feel we can do through programming in ASP.NET and Orchard.

– So where do you feel Orchard Core really shines? What makes it stand out for you after all these years?

Toby: We see Orchard Core as highly flexible, powerful, affordable, and fast.

We feel that extending its features through custom module development in ASP.NET allows us to do anything we can dream up.

We also like the fact that version changes are easier to accommodate, as Microsoft tends to respect the need to support legacy technologies for a longer period than the alternative PHP-centric projects.

We hope to be using Orchard Core as our platform for a good five to ten years — maybe more!

– If you could change or improve one thing in Orchard Core based on your experience, what would it be?

Toby: Getting the development environment up and running is tricky at times, and I’ve gotten quite stuck just getting going.

There’s a learning curve — but that’s true for any platform — and Orchard concepts align closely to ASP.NET ones, so finding help is never difficult.

Thankfully, Lombiq has been there to hold our hands for years now.

There’s no question that to use Orchard Core you need to have a good amount of experience with ASP.NET and/or access to developers like Lombiq to help you — ideally both.

– You’ve been part of the Orchard Core community for a while now. What’s your experience been like with it over the years?

I honestly feel guilty that I haven’t made more of the regular meetings. I’d like to feel more connected to it.

I appreciate Lombiq’s help organizing and connecting people within the community as well. It’s such amazing technology — it sells itself really — but I get the sense it could use more evangelists.

– You’ve worked with Lombiq for quite a while now. What made us the right fit back then — and what’s kept you coming back all these years?

Toby: Lombiq has for some time now been the strongest vendor in the Orchard space.

We are loyal to the quality of the work they do and happily recommend them to others.

They are very passionate and kind people — a pleasure to work with.

– What would you tell other organizations that are considering Orchard Core or thinking about working with Lombiq?

Toby: If you are passionate about your work and determined to deploy technologies that cater specifically to your vision without compromise, then you must invest in design and technologies that are flexible and robust.

Orchard Core development on the ASP.NET platform is a safe and sound investment that aims you in the direction of success at a manageable cost and with the promise of nothing being impossible.

Smithsonian Folkways is considered one of the great folk music record labels, and that success is driven by our ability to share our recordings in our own unique way.

Orchard Core empowers us to achieve our goals — supporting our website while providing the backend capabilities we need to succeed in our business.

Thanks to Toby for sharing this behind-the-scenes look at how Smithsonian Folkways built and evolved a platform that does so much more than power a website.

His story is a reminder that with the right tools — and the right team — Orchard Core can become a core part of how organizations work, grow, and deliver on their mission.

Want to build something like this? Contact us to talk through how we can help.