Archive transcription portal for the Nerve Centre and PRONI
We were approached by The Nerve Centre in collaboration with PRONI to create a bespoke website and data entry portal for their ambitious project, CollabArchive. The project focused on digitalising and documenting the experiences of minority groups in Northern Ireland.
CollabArchive in numbers
The challenge: archives, opened up
The Nerve Centre and PRONI wanted the public to help open up the archive, transcribing diaries, captioning video and entering statistics from home.
That means handing archive material to volunteers who have had no training and are not in the building. It had to be secure enough for the record office, simple enough that a first-time volunteer could start in minutes, and on-brand with a campaign already running in print and on social.
Archive material also arrives in forms a plain text box cannot handle. A diary page, an audio recording and a table of statistics each need a different kind of workspace, and a volunteer moves between them in a single session.
Volunteers are the scarcest resource on a project like this. Anyone who gives up at the sign-up stage is gone for good, so the route from landing page to first transcription had to be short enough to hold somebody’s attention on a weeknight.
Our approach: volunteers first
CollabArchive is a digital volunteering project from the Nerve Centre, in partnership with the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, creating ways for the public to engage directly with archives.
Volunteers transcribe diary entries and audio files, write captions for video and enter statistics into a digital spreadsheet, all inside their own secure online portal. Each material type gets a workspace suited to it rather than one generic form.
Finished work is published back out to the public site, so a volunteer can see the collection they helped open up instead of filing effort into a system and never hearing about it again.
The design follows the project’s brand guidelines closely, so the site matches the graphics already out in the world on social media and on print material taken to physical venues to recruit.
What we built for CollabArchive
Two audiences and one system: the public who come to look, and the volunteers who come to work.
Volunteer portal
Each volunteer gets a secure account and a workspace of their own, so archive material is never emailed around or downloaded onto a personal machine.
Transcription tools
Diary pages, audio files, video captions and statistical tables each get a workspace suited to the material rather than one generic text box.
Project management
Administrators set up a project, load the material, release it to volunteers and track what has been completed, without coming to us to open a new collection.
Public outcomes
Completed transcriptions are published back to the public site, so volunteers can see the collection they helped open up.
On-brand front end
The build follows the CollabArchive brand guidelines, so the site matches the print and social artwork the campaign was already running.
Short route to starting
Registration to first transcription takes minutes, because a volunteer who stalls at sign-up does not come back later.
The Tech-Spec
Laravel and Vue, split into a public site and a secure volunteer portal behind a login. Administrators create projects and load material through their own admin, volunteers work entirely in a browser with nothing to install, and completed transcriptions are published back out to the public collection.
HTML5, SCSS, CSS3, vue.js
Laravel (MVC framework)
Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager
Services on this project
Most of our clients use more than one.
Web applications
Software that does a job for the business rather than describing it. Members platforms, custom admin software and internal tools built around how the work actually gets done.
→ 02Bespoke websites
Designed and built from scratch around your business rather than adapted from a template. Every page and every field is there because it earns its place.
→More work
A few of the other projects we have built.
