The Church of England general synod team needed to migrate the entire synod archive of legal documents over to the new Church of England website. Having previously managed the creation of an 800 page archive of reference material on Drupal for Church House Publishing, I was hired again for this project.
1450+ pdf archive
I created the General Synod Agendas and Papers section of the award winning Church of England website. In doing so I built a substantial archive of legal document pdf’s, with 1450+ General Synod papers, agendas voting results and other items.
The project involved finding and downloading documents from the defunct proprietary CMS, creating a page structure on the new Drupal website, tracking all of the documents across and linking them into their new pages. To structure the archive I created 18 pages pages and a new meta-tag schema too. I also embedded sound-cloud files and created a menu structure to make the pages as informative and user friendly as possible.
Learning on the Job
I didn’t know a lot about the archive when I started work on this project, I had to learn about the function and importance of these documents quickly. The previous archive had gaps, corrupted files and the structure wasn’t consistent, patching it back together again was an important part of the role.
Stakeholders
In this project liaised with two groups of stakeholders, the digital team and the synod team. I helped to find compromises and technical solutions to meet their differing requirements. I also managed another freelance data entry specialist to complete the project in good time.
Task list
- Designing a workflow, filename and metadata schema
- Downloading and renaming each PDF from the old archive
- Checking the contents of each document match the title and description
- Creating a list of missing titles and merging in any that could be found elsewhere
- Uploading them to the new Drupal website
- Tagging, naming etc
- Creating new pages with drop-down sections for each conference
- Creating lists of the files, matching the files to the conference
- Linking to the files using html
- Checking the work