The Church of England’s General Synod team needed its entire archive of legal documents moved to the new Church of England website. The old system was defunct, and the archive had gaps, corrupted files and lacked structure. I had already built the worship texts archive for Church House Publishing, and was hired again to do this one.
The problem: an archive nobody could rely on
Over 1,450 documents, including General Synod papers, agendas and voting results, had to be found, downloaded and moved. These are legal documents, so a missing or mislabelled file matters. The old archive couldn’t be trusted to be complete or consistent, so a straight copy-across would have carried every flaw into the new site.
Design the structure first
Before moving anything, I designed the workflow, a filename convention and a metadata schema, so every document would be named, tagged and filed the same way. I built 18 pages on the new Drupal site, with drop-down sections for each session, and a menu structure that made them easy to navigate.
Check what’s actually in each file
I downloaded and renamed each PDF, then checked that the contents matched the title and description, since in an archive in this condition a file’s label couldn’t be taken on trust. Where documents were missing or corrupted, I listed them, sought out copies from elsewhere and merged in any that could be found.
Keep track of everything
With 1,450+ items to place, I tracked every document from the old system through to its new page, matched each file to its session, and checked the work at the end.
I also embedded SoundCloud audio where it was available, and managed an additional freelance data entry specialist so the project finished in good time.
Working between two teams
The digital team and the synod team had different priorities. I found technical solutions that worked for both. I also had to learn quickly what these documents were for and why they mattered, since I started with little knowledge of the archive.
The result
The General Synod archive went live in 2018, and the documents are still part of the Church of England website today. The site has been reorganised since, with a different drop-down structure, but the archive carried through the changes without being rebuilt. That’s because every file was consistently named, tagged and matched to its session.
Leave a Reply