Case Study: The King Center achieves a scalable, high-traffic digital archive of Dr. King’s collection with Acquia

The King Center presents precious history with help from Acquia and Palantir.net

The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change set out to digitize and publish hundreds of thousands of primary-source items from its million-plus collection so the public could access Dr. King’s work and Civil Rights-era materials online for the first time. The project involved multiple partners (JPMC, C&G Partners, Palantir.net, Micro Strategies, Acquia and others) and presented technical challenges: integrating Alfresco as the document repository with a Drupal front end while content and taxonomies were still being entered, and meeting a hard launch date (MLK Day 2012) with expectations of heavy traffic.

Palantir built the Drupal site and Alfresco integration, hosted on Acquia Cloud, while Micro Strategies implemented the Alfresco infrastructure and Acquia (with SOASTA) load-tested and scaled the platform. The launch succeeded—serving 175,000+ unique visitors on day one, load-tested to 25,000 concurrent users, with 5,000+ items initially available and 200,000 images prepared for ongoing upload—giving educators, researchers, and the public broad access to the King Center’s archives with continued 24/7 managed support.

The King Center

Rick Rose

IT Director