A New Case Library and Archive Experience for the National High School Ethics Bowl

During my tenure as Director, and after the National High School Ethics Bowl’s 2022 rebrand rolled out, my team and I began work to reengineer our system for archiving previously used Ethics Bowl cases. These case studies have an important second life beyond the merely archival as pedagogical resources used in classrooms, discussion groups, professional education training sessions, and other surprising venues around the country. A weeks-long summer systems analysis and much trial-and-error infrastructure and design work resulted in a brand new Case Library and content management system, which replaced a rapidly aging legacy system in 2023. The former Case Archive organized past NHSEB cases as hyperlinked PDF sets and used a static database for referencing, significantly limiting the system’s user experience.

In the new Case Library experience, each individual case is broken out of its original competition set to stand on its own. Each case includes the original full text, updated discussion questions to frame up case analyses, and newly-curated supplemental resources including video content, news stories covering recent developments, and topically relevant interactive resources. Each case also now includes a downloadable and printable version in PDF format for ease of use in classroom settings. The entire database is cross linked and referenced by filters which slice up entries by keyword, topic, year, and a vastly improved search functions which quantifies over these properties as well as each case’s full text.