archif.com

One of the challenges of working in a bilingual environment (in my case English and Welsh) is that everything "public" has to be, more or less, supplied in both languages.

The original website for the National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales was actually two separate websites, with separate - and very long - addresses - one for the English site, one for the Welsh.

A couple of years ago, it was decided this was unsustainable, and that we should join with the (then) new National Library of Wales site, which is built on an integrated bilingual system. This would hopefully allow us to maintain and develop a web presence with our somewhat diminished resources. It was also a functional necessity, due to the fact that NLW (which includes NSSAW) was going down a "one database, one set of finding aids" route, and integrating this approach into the structure of the old website was a nightmare.

Nothing is simple, is it? I won't bore you with all the interesting challenges the wonderful people in the NLW Computer Dept. had to surmount (well, I would bore you, but I don't actually understand some of the problems!).

Today the website "went live". The first visible change is that we now have one address, archif.com which leads to a splash page, where the user can choose the language of the interface. However, the big difference for us is the CMS which manages the pages, and which allows us, in an integrated way, to load bilingual information. The other difference is that much of the site will now be driven by a "blogging engine", which the aforementioned computing staff have integrated into the system. This means that the core information about the Archive - which by nature is fairly static, can be added to fairly quickly with new information about things that are current at the time of writing.

It's obviously early days, and I'm sure we'll have a few hiccups, and I know we have a lot more to learn. On a personal note, I'll be sad that some of highly useable catalogues found on the old site have disappeared. But all the information held in them (ISYS and film catalogue) has been ported to the NLW Virtua/Vital system. In fact, this corporate catalogue houses, literally, hundreds of thousands of catalogue records for a-v material which couldn't be accessed via the old system. But more info often means that it can be harder to find exactly what you need, and those used to the super-easy to navigate film catalogue, will find things a bit harder. It's fairly easy to spot a big fish in a small pool, but the same size fish in an ocean is harder to catch, and the film data, and all the other a-v data come to that, now live in a gigantic pool of millions of catalogue records for everything from paintings to paper archives, to photographs, to books and periodicals.

Congratulations to my colleagues at NSSAW and NLW for getting the new site up and running.