Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ)

The Client

Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ), the National Library and Archives of Quebec, is a government agency that manages the province's national archives and national library. 

The Situation

BAnQ wanted to revamp its website into a platform where employees could curate and update content easily and regularly. Additionally, to free up costs and tech resources associated with server maintenance, BAnQ wanted to migrate from on-premise hosting to cloud hosting.

The Challenge

BAnQ wanted to migrate its website from dotCMS to Drupal 9, and its hosting from an on-premise solution to Acquia Cloud Platform. It wanted to build a custom Drupal admin interface to improve its website's functionality, searchability, and accessibility. However, implementing content entry in existing wireframes with newly created features like content blocks, buttons, titles, and headers proved challenging. And it was difficult to anticipate and determine technical specifications for new content types between back-end development and front-end requirements. 

The Solution

Partner Evolving Web took the lead in helping BAnQ integrate a seamless, sustainable content creation and site management workflow into Drupal. They performed technical discovery workshops, identifying integration points and infrastructure needs for authentication, then collaborated closely with BAnQ's technological and design teams so they could take ownership post-launch. Additionally, Evolving Web defined launch roles and responsibilities to ensure a smooth transition and provided content entry training and governance best practices, empowering content editors to build high-quality, accessible content independently. 

The teams collaborated to develop custom components and content types in Layout Builder. Evolving Web also refreshed the site’s visual design, added WCAG-compliant features, and improved the site’s information architecture. 

The website implemented various technologies that integrated seamlessly to create an ambitious website hosting the province's archives. The technologies combined include:

• Acquia Cloud Platform for hosting
• Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) for the employee logins
• Radware web application firewall
• Google Custom Search Engine for search
   

By integrating all these technologies, the teams created a website that provides critical and timely health information to millions of Quebec residents. And Evolving Web credits Acquia's four environments (dev, QA, staging, and production) with helping it confidently ship features faster than ever. 

The Results

The teams customized more than 14 content types and 17 components for Layout Builder. The new BAnQ website has a fresh design and a user-centric, accessible information architecture. By meeting challenges head-on, BAnQ's new website provides easy navigation and highlights the institution's cultural richness.

Thanks to Acquia's redundant, highly available platform, the BAnQ website sees, on average, over 350,000 visits and 1 million views per month. And migrating its hosting from on-premise to Acquia Cloud Platform means that BAnQ no longer needs to maintain servers, freeing up significant costs and resources.