The Smyth County Public Library’s Digital Collection arose from a collaboration between the Smyth County Genealogical Society and the library. Many residents allowed their materials to be scanned for the archive and others donated their time to help scan the items. The collection consists of photographs, documents, and other items.
The Challenge
The Smyth County Digital Collection is a collection of over 15,000 digital scans across lots of subcategories and growing. The content management system used to house the collection was not being renewed and the library had to decide where and how they would be moving the large collection of media and data. The Library, having just worked with us to redesign and rebuild the Library’s main site, came to us with a few third-party solutions they had looked at and asked if we could propose anything better. So we did.
The Solution
As library staff was already accustomed to the WordPress site we previously built for them, we proposed we import the entire collection into their WordPress site. The old system could export data, so we imported all 15,000 records into WordPress using a custom post type and custom taxonomies to help organize the collection. That many scans involve a lot of storage, so we relied on AWS to offload and host images. Now the digital collection lives right within their WordPress site and can be easily managed by staff and browsed by visitors. Items can also appear in the Library’s site search.
