Sector(s)
Team Members
Project Team
- Annertech - project lead, Drupal development, support and hosting
- bigO - design
Visit the site
Visit the siteOrganizations Involved
Community contributions
Approximately 10 patches to Drupal core and contrib modules were tested and are in use on the site. Each of those helps bring Drupal forwards as a more stable and useful platform.
With more than one million page views per year, the National Library of Ireland’s website is the primary means by which the public can access information about the NLI.
The NLI had worked with their old website, which was built on a custom CMS with ASPX, for quite a few years before making the leap towards a new solution.
Aside from no longer reflecting NLI’s brand and presence, the website offered limited opportunities for creative flexibility.
Annertech and bigO partnered to build a new website for the National Library of Ireland, replacing their outmoded existing site with a sleekly designed Drupal-based platform. Annertech led the project. bigO focused on the design of the new website, while Annertech handled the development.
About the project
The goals for the new website included the following:
Bilingual
The old website wasn’t fully bilingual. As Ireland’s national library, NLI was committed to having a fully bilingual website – that offered exactly the same content in both Irish and English.
To allow for the ambitious target of translating all content on the website, an automated translation process was implemented. The content is time-sensitive, so this process allows the team to focus on creating content and saves duplication of effort on an ongoing basis.
Among other options, the automation allows NLI to export new or changed content on the website in a format commonly used by translation agencies, and import the translated content directly back into the website without need for manual content entry.
Now the NLI website is fully bilingual, in line with the Irish Official Languages Act 2003.
Search
The library's vast Collections form a large part of NLI's offering to the public, caring for more than 12 million items including books, manuscripts, drawings and many other items. NLI makes the Collections available to the public online via a catalogue interface, and the experience in connecting the old website to this catalogue felt disconnected. Users need to be able to search this collection and easily find what they were looking for.
While acting as an educational tool outlining how and why the Collections are maintained, it was important to create a connection between the website and the Collections portal to allow it to work together as a unified experience.
To facilitate this, the search tool on the NLI website retrieves results from both the NLI website and the Collections website. This is achieved by querying the Collections website and returning the top 3 results - these results are rendered alongside the website’s results to achieve a unified search experience, and help to familiarise users with the Collections.
The Collections section has been the most viewed section of the new website since it launched with 14% of the overall views. The Collections section saw a major content rework with a view to making the content more engaging, which resulted the bounce rate collectively being reduced by nearly 50%
Flexibility
As is common with legacy websites, the opportunity to create dynamic, visually appealing content often doesn't exist. For the old NLI website, this meant an over-abundance of text-heavy pages to try to capture what should be quite visual content.
The new content management system needed to be flexible. Building blocks were designed so that their web pages would hold together in a coherent way.
As well as new content, such as the learning programme and resources, the NLI offers a variety of services, including tours, workshops, talks, downloadable resources, podcasts, videos and courses. The building blocks give content editors the flexibility to publish a range of content, including the new types of content.
Modular elements in both design and functionality are key to how they will communicate their future offerings without resorting to further development requirements, instead building their own solutions in-house using the elements of their own site.
This flexibility would also serve the library well in future. The NLI is undergoing a large-scale capital improvement in their buildings, and exhibition spaces, live events, a cafe and a gift shop will become part of their public offering in coming years, and the new site gives the NLI an improved platform for launching further online services.
Accessibility
The library’s website needed to be both easy to use on any type of device as well as accessible to users who may have some sort of impairment. In order to better cater to the needs and wishes of its visitors, the website is fully tailored to browsing on desktop and mobile devices.
The NLI website needed to comply with the Website Content Accessibility guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 AA, which are mandatory for the public sector in Ireland. In terms of Drupal build, the new site is WCAG 2.1 compliant.
Integration with other channels
The NLI website needed to be integrated with other channels and platforms for its various new functions to work efficiently.
Eventbrite
The management of events and exhibitions is aided by direct integration with NLI's event management system Eventbrite, to ensure both consistency across platforms and significantly reduce duplication of effort by NLI's events team.
With the website’s increased content needs, it was important to ensure duplication of effort was minimised, particularly around content for events where there would be ongoing effort.
The integration allows for all event content to be created and updated on the website only. This information is automatically mirrored to NLI’s Eventbrite account every time a change occurs.
The online calendar of NLI Exhibitions and Events provides a clear and easily navigated events calendar, allowing users to search by facets such as date, type of event, type of audience, time, venue etc.
Since the website launched, the Events and Exhibitions section of the website has seen a 40% increase in the number of pageviews compared to the same period last year.
The busy programme of events, which can now be booked directly through the website, are regularly sold out. Links to the online exhibitions, as well as news and stories, are widely shared across social media.
Stripe
A donation system was introduced to allow NLI to take single or recurring payments from visitors to support the work done at the library.
This piece of functionality works via a Stripe integration utilising both the Checkout and Billing products from Stripe. The payment flow is branded to provide a seamless experience for users, and passes the user back to the website once the payment is complete.
Results
Following launch of the new site, the NLI saw a 40% increase in website visitors and a 50% reduction in bounce rate
for the Collections section. In addition, overall engagement with the site has increased and the number of people accessing their resources has significantly increased.
As testament to the work put into the site, it has won numerous awards including the coveted Grand Prix award at the 2024 Spider Awards as well as an award for Best Universal Design. It was also a runner-up in the Digital Accessibility category at the 2024 National Digital Awards and won the Best Website award at the Digital Media Awards.
Testimonial
"Annertech worked with us throughout this major project. Their knowledge and commitment to delivering an AA rated website enabled us to deliver an accessible and bilingual, redesigned website that will better serve our online users."
– Caoimhe Fox - Communications and development officer at NLI
Why Drupal was chosen
Libraries, by their nature, are complex organisations that fulfil multiple purposes to a wide user base. For NLI, given its size and status, its roles are even more varied and important.
To address this concern, the central principles of the website design were accessibility and flexibility, both of which are addressed with Drupal 9, which is what the website was built on.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Gin was used because it is built on top of core Claro (and thus has good accessibility), but it also has extra goodies. The frontend theme is completely custom with focus on accessibility.
The Translation Management Tool and Layout Builder Asymmetric Translation tools were needed for the multilingual aspects of the site. In particular, it was important to be able to integrate with the external translation providers tools for a seamless translation workflow. It was also important that the English and Irish content could vary in layout and content, depending on what translated assets were available.
