Heritage organizations are typically well known for their vast repositories of data, and the Philadelphia-based Presbyterian Historical Society (PHS) is no exception.
The organization serves as the national archive for the Presbyterian Church and possesses 500 years’ worth of published and archived digital material — including more than 250,000 titles and over 30,000 cubic feet of official records, personal papers, and artifacts — in addition to a wide range of online services offered to church members, scholars, and the general public. When PHS approached Eastern Standard for assistance with a new website that would make the organization more appealing to new and younger audiences and a better defined system for organizing and displaying their voluminous content collection, the partnership was a natural fit. We had undertaken similar projects with Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University , among others, and our team was well equipped and well versed in cataloguing vast volumes of records, documents, and data.
The new site not only appeals to new and younger viewers — it also boasts a better defined system for organizing and displaying a vast content collection.
In addition to creating a visually compelling design, one of the keys to the success of this project was the creation of a searchable database of finding aids (search guides), essentially mini roadmaps for visitors in search of particular archived documents. We also migrated PHS’s comprehensive website archive, a curated collection of Presbyterian related sites preserved in partnership with the Archive-It program. Finally, we incorporated the organization’s robust and active blog, tagged by author and related keywords to allow for easy searching and related reading.
Hundreds of search guides were created to simplify the search-and-retrieval process for archived documents
