NSW State Archives & Records

Industry
Government Project

Solution
Online Application

Project Summary

State Archives and Records Authority of New South Wales has a CMS for their library, which is built with Exlibris Primo.

They wanted to develop a system where they can sell their merchandise and also allow people to book library hours online. However, Exlibris Primo doesn’t have these features. WebAlive was tasked with building a system on top of Exlibris so that these requirements are met.

www.records.nsw.gov.au

Technologies Used

jQuery is an open-source JavaScript library used by 73% of the 10 million most popular websites.

Laravel is a popular open-source web application framework of PHP.

Client Overview

The State Archives and Records Authority of New South Wales is one of the most distinguishable archives in Australia.

They store a vast collection of historical and government documents and also make those accessible for the general public. People can book library hours and buy items using their online platform.

Key Challenges

- The archive was running a legacy CMS. There was no way to customise the core application or make server-side modifications. Still, the client wanted to add a full-fledged ecommerce system to it.

- There was no option to add any DOM in the system, but we needed to generate dynamic DOM for shopping cart and reading room requests. Besides, we were asked to add a buy/request button to each item on the search result based on the item type.

- The archive pictures needed to be presented in a gallery slide show from where people should be able to buy/share those. But there was no API or endpoint to get those pictures.

- New customer sign-ups and orders were required to be processed through the Archive’s existing API which communicates with the ecommerce platform to get product price and check validation.

- All the reading request/pre-order tickets were also required to be synchronised with the available items using the existing API server.

Our Solution

For this project, we built an innovative two-app solution. One was developed using jQuery and another using Laravel. Combining their existing Exlibris Primo system with these apps, we were able to meet all the project requirements.

The jQuery app was built on top of the Exlibris Primo CMS. We used this app to implement all the client end logics, facilitate API communication, create shopping carts, slide shows, and also generate all the call to action buttons.

The Laravel app worked as the middle layer between the jQuery app and the archive’s Axile API server. It processes orders and reading room requests.

The Laravel app is the main engine of the system. It receives cart from the jQuery app, sends confirmation emails to customers, gives Admin access to configure product prices, and shows reports on orders and reading room requests. It’s connected with the WestPack payment system.

Development Process

We completed this project using the philosophy of Agile and followed the Scrum framework. The iterative, incremental development process and regular interaction with the client have turned this challenging project into a success story.
Not a single schedule or iteration was overrun, and there was no discrepancy between the client requirement and final output.

Final Result

Though there were a lot of challenges, the customer was happy with the end result. We are proud of the innovative solution we built for NSW State Archives & Records as this project gave us a chance to improve the experience of many archive users and researchers. The Archive authority was very cooperative. It was a great journey and experience for our team.