How Curation Works

You curate the museum from Airtable. You don’t build pages or write code, and nothing is ever generated for you. You choose what is shown, in what order, and with what few words of framing — and the museum reflects those choices. This page is the mental model behind that: what’s yours to shape, what the system handles, and the one thing that surprises every new curator — when a change appears.

Curated, not collected

StoryKeep is not a photo dump with a search box. A museum is what a person chose to hang on the wall, in what order, with the one sentence that makes you stop. That choosing is the whole product, and it is yours.

So the system will never do the choosing for you. It does not auto-arrange rooms, auto-write captions, auto-title a set, or call any AI to fill a blank. A field you leave empty stays empty — there is no placeholder, no “no note available,” no filler. An empty note simply means this placement didn’t need one, and the museum renders it cleanly with nothing there.

Tip

The right pressure is some placements are richer than others. A room with a note on every set looks busy; a room with a note on the two pieces that genuinely need framing looks curated. Restraint reads as care.

What’s yours, and what the museum handles

You shape	The museum handles on its own
Which photos and sets appear, and in which room	Assembling the room, layout, and typography
The order of a room	Responsive sizing, the wall view, the lightbox
A short curator note where a placement earns one	Surfacing dates and the photographer automatically
Approving or holding visitor submissions	Emailing the submitter once you approve
A room’s visibility (shown / under construction)	Copying photos to permanent storage, refreshing the live site

You never touch code, never publish by hand, and never delete a family’s originals — the archive is kept, always. If something needs building (a new kind of room, a new field), that’s an engineering change, not a curator action; flag it and it gets scheduled.

When your changes appear — the one rule to internalise

This is the part that trips everyone up on day one, so it’s worth being exact.

You, as a curator, see your edits right away. Your curator view reads Airtable live — the moment you save a note or reorder a room, that’s what you see. There’s no waiting on your side.

Visitors see your edits after the next scheduled refresh. The live museum doesn’t read Airtable on every visit — that would be slow and fragile, and it would put the family’s page at the mercy of a spreadsheet. Instead, the museum serves from a settled copy that refreshes on a schedule. So a change you make now becomes visible to visitors after the next refresh, not instantly.

1. In your training sandbox, the refresh is near-immediate — your curator view reads Airtable directly, so you’ll see changes almost as soon as you’ve made them. That’s by design, so training has a tight feedback loop.

2. On a live family museum, the refresh is batched — it runs on a schedule, about every 6 hours. Plan for a short delay between an edit and a visitor seeing it.

Note

This delay is deliberate, not a bug. A family’s museum should feel like a settled, quiet place — not a live document that flickers as someone edits behind the scenes. The pause is the calm. If you need something live for a specific moment (a family gathering), plan the edit ahead of the refresh window rather than at the last minute.

Visitor submissions — the approval loop

Families can invite relatives to send in photos. Those don’t appear on the wall on their own — they wait for you.

1. A submission arrives in Airtable marked as pending (moderation status).

2. You review it: set its Moderation Status to approved for the ones that belong, or rejected for the rest. (Submissions arrive as Source = visitor-submission.)

3. On the next refresh, an approved photo joins its room, and the person who sent it gets a short thank-you email — automatically, once, the moment it’s approved.

Nothing a visitor sends is ever lost, and nothing they send appears until you’ve chosen it. You are the gate.

Two words to avoid, and one rule that outranks taste

Whatever you write into the museum — notes, room names, titles — follows the house voice:

• Never “archive.” These are living family museums, not archives. The word makes them sound closed and dead.
• Never “video.” Use the language of the piece itself (a film, a screening, a story), not the file format.
• Legibility outranks everything. Either a visitor can comfortably read it, or it shouldn’t be there. This isn’t a preference to weigh against a nicer font or a tighter layout — it’s the line. Elders are the audience; if they can’t read it, it’s not working.

Where to go next

• Airtable Curator Fields — the exact fields you write into, and what the museum does with each.
• Managing Access — inviting family members and curators.
• Setting Up a Room — configuring a room in Airtable from scratch.