Transforming archive website development: Gooii creates new website for Scotland’s rich collection of archives
‘Your Scottish Archives’ catalogues and provides guidance on Scotland’s archives
Gooii has been working on an archive website development project for the Scottish Council on Archives to develop the ‘Your Scottish Archives’ portal. It is a new online database that catalogues archival collections across Scotland.
Our development team has carefully crafted a bespoke website and search system that enables users to explore its archive collections. For this, we developed a new WordPress instance. This is a website powered by WordPress, with a custom theme built according to the needs of the client.
Why the Scottish Council of Archives approached Gooii to develop its new archive website
The Your Scottish Archives (YSA) website draws data from Jisc’s Archives Hub, which we launched in 2017. The system provides researchers with access to millions of records from 320 institutions across the UK.
Thanks to funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the SCA wanted to commission a system that would make it easy for users to search through its vast collection of archives. Having seen our software and website development first hand with the Archives Hub, the SCA got in touch to discuss the possibilities of Gooii developing a system with similar functionality.
Read about our work for Jisc’s Archives Hub
Our team has intimate knowledge of the data within the Archives Hub system. We understand its hierarchical nature and have extensive experience of developing systems that are capable of holding such huge archives. We develop streamlined, intuitive User Interfaces (UI) that enable users to quickly search for specific terms and documents, whether they’re archivists, researchers or the wider public.
The brief
The new website needed to have:
- Its own branded and bespoke search interface and functionality. This would make it easy for users to search its extensive database of archives.
- The ability to publish editorial content and features.
- Information on how to contribute your own archival data.
Project partners
It’s been a pleasure to work alongside the Archives Hub and John Pelan and his team at the SCA.
We also worked with Knowledge Integration, as the YSA data is currently aggregated by them. We also worked their Collections Information Integration Middleware (CIIM), as part of the Archives Hub.
How we developed the SCA’s new archive search system
Using a CIIM to index documents
CIIM is a middleware solution – software that works between an operating system and the applications running on it. The CIIM can extract, collect and synchronise data from back-office systems and present it to users in the Elasticsearch database. This is where the data is held. We used CIIM and Elasticsearch for Jisc’s Archives Hub and knew it would work perfectly for the SCA website.
Integrating the search engine with the website
We used PHP and Clojure coding to integrate the Elasticsearch search engine with the site. We have delivered a variety of other projects using these technologies to run this database in order to build bespoke archive websites.
Integrating the Elasticsearch search application with the wider WordPress infrastructure was a new challenge for the team. We provisioned a Google Cloud-based Elasticsearch instance into which the Archives Hub system routinely publishes the data provided by archival contributors in Scotland. This serves as the database for the YSA website.
Making Scotland’s archives accessible through innovative website development
Our collaboration with the SCA on the development of Your Scottish Archives is a significant advancement in how archival collections across Scotland are accessed and explored.
By using our expertise in building large-scale, intuitive archival systems, we’ve created a powerful, user-friendly platform that meets the unique needs of the SCA.
This project not only showcases our technical capabilities in integrating complex systems like Elasticsearch and WordPress, but also highlights our commitment to preserving and promoting archival heritage.
It has been an honour to work with such dedicated partners and we look forward to seeing the impact this new platform will have on researchers and the general public alike.
Keep up to date with news on the project on our social media – LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.
Article by
Franz Evert
Franz is a Technical Director at Gooii and has over 20 years’ experience developing commercial and open source database driven software in many languages. Franz’s other skills include project management and client liaison and he’s passionate about high web standards and internet security.