Digital Transformation of a Major Library Website

Evolving Web worked with the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) to redesign its primary website, building a platform where staff can curate selected content from the Library and Archives, and users also have the ability to search across multiple data sources. The result is a more user-centric and accessible website that archivists, researchers, and the public can use to access the plethora of cultural resources and knowledge materials that are available to them. 

Our team moved the organization to Drupal and customized the content publishing workflows around the needs of librarians and their distributed editorial vision. The new website puts an emphasis on searchability and accessibility, ensuring that web content, catalogs, digital services, and resources are available to as many Quebec residents as possible. As the organization continues to go through a digital transformation process, the new website is ready to be adapted to changing needs and integrations.
 

Services: Web Development, Maintenance and Support, Discovery, SEO audit 

Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) gathers, preserves, and promotes provides citizens with democratic access to culture and knowledge. As a prominent cultural hub and institution in North America, BAnQ strives to democratize access to knowledge. BAnQ is spread across 12 public facilities in Québec including the National Library, National Archives, and the Public Library located in downtown Montréal.

Our primary goal was to transform the site into a platform where staff (especially librarians) could easily curate content from the archives and highlight the many services available that users are unaware of. The new website needed to better balance the needs of archivists, advanced users often searching for specific documents, and the general public looking to explore the Library and Archives and discover new services. 

We wanted the website to serve as a leader in accessibility best practices, going above and beyond standard WCAG AA compliance. And finally, we wanted to move the entire platform to a Cloud hosting environment to reduce the cost of ownership and free up BAnQ’s technical teams to make continuous improvements to the website itself.
 

Challenges during the project included coordinating the work of multiple teams during a period of digital transformation, when both the end-user experience and the back-end services and APIs were in flux.

The BAnQ website leverages Drupal’s powerful CMS features and distributed content workflows. The platform brings together existing content from multiple sources and highlights the cultural richness of the institution and Quebec as a whole. 

As their trusted Drupal experts, Evolving Web’s team has worked closely with BAnQ’s stakeholders and staff to create the technical components that are essential to keeping their digital assets and resources at the forefront of the user experience. 

Our work included:

• Building a custom Drupal admin interface for teams to manage and deploy content on the website 
• Enabling Layout Builder for content editors to create custom layouts in Drupal for content types, individual entities, and features
• Integrating optimal accessibility features such as the ability to adjust the size of text, to customize the colors and contrast of the website, and to select default captions in all video assets 
• Training and consultations for content entry and governance best practices in the Drupal CMS
• Custom integrations for API-connected Drupal forms and Azure AD identity management 
• Assisting with Google Tag Manager and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) best practices
• Building an integration with existing BAnQ API to provide the user with a seamless search experience, providing results from 4 different sources
• Leveraging internal APIs to fetch calendar results from a Connect Daily system, a system used to plan all Library events and is exposing location information
• Building a custom SAML solution to provide authentication to the AzureAD system and the local Shibboleth instance.
• Configuration and setup of the AzureAD SAML application
• Configuration of migration scripts to import articles and authors from the legacy CMS (dotCMS) to Drupal, and training for BAnQ staff to enable them to contribute to the migration process
  
   

The new BAnQ website provides an effective platform for staff to deliver online services to Quebecers. Content editors have access to 14 content types and 17 components and drag-and-drop page building with Drupal’s Layout Builder. This has enabled staff to put valuable digital assets and resources at the forefront of the user experience. The platform provides accessibility tools that go beyond standard WCAG AA guidelines and make content available to as wide an audience as possible. Since the migration to Drupal, the website has celebrated clocking over one million visits to the homepage.