Project Launch: Archnet NEXT
A new software architecture for a venerable archive of architectural records
The Performant Software Solutions team is thrilled to announce the launch of our most recent Digital Humanities project: Archnet NEXT, the third version of the Archnet website, which replaces version 2.0, launched in 2014. The first version of the site launched in 2002, so it’s almost 20 years old, and going strong!
Archnet is “the largest online library focused on the built environments of Muslim societies”, and contains over 8,000 records describing architectural sites worldwide; upwards of 1,000 authority records, describing people and places; hundreds of collections, and an astounding 125,000-plus media records, including images, videos and documents in its catalog.
We at Performant Software are deeply honored to have been selected to collaborate with the experts at the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC), and the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT Libraries (AKDC), to design and develop this new version of this important open access resource for researchers and students of architecture and history worldwide.
While it’s really the content available on Archnet, expertly compiled and curated over 20 years by archivists, cataloguers, and librarians, and the investment made by AKTC and AKDC to support the work of those librarians, that make this website so valuable, we’re excited to share the process we used, the technologies we selected, and the architecture we developed for the site, which helped the team reach the design goals of this project, and which we think make it the best version of Archnet so far.
Design Goals
Primary among the design goals identified by the project team were:
- Serve users on mobile devices and slower networks, who were largely or completely excluded from using the existing site.
- Simplify and improve browsing and searching features, and make it possible to search the archive in languages other than English.
- Bring 100% of the existing data, images over to the new site, and make it easier and faster to add new content.
- Modernize the look and feel of the site, and update the infrastructure and the software development methodologies used to build it.
- Improve performance of the site, both for content managers and end users.
Audiences
Through a discovery process, we identified existing and new audiences whom the site serves. For an archive so rich with content, and media, it’s not a surprise that two key audiences who emerged were content editors and end users.
In addition, it became clear that the end user audience for Archnet is very diverse, in terms of their goals in using the site, their locations, devices, and languages, and that some of those groups were not well served by Archnet 2 (especially users of mobile devices, and speakers of languages other than English).
Those two audiences have divergent needs, so as we began to think about the architecture of the site, we gravitated toward technology solutions that offered flexibility, so that we could build separate interfaces, each hosted on a different platform, for each audience. For those who like buzzwords, the solutions we selected are what are referred to in web development as “JAMstack” technologies.
Features
Browsing
The new browse pages make it easy to peruse new records, save sites to visit before you leave, see sites near you (using your browser location, which is never stored except in your browser), and focus on the sites that have won the prestigious Aga Khan Award for Architecture.
Search
The new search feature includes faceted browsing, and geographical search, as well as multilingual queries, and it’s blazing fast.
Viewing Records
A record can be viewed with all of its metadata in one place, and all of its associated images and videos organized into a carousel.
Technology
The Archnet data model is quite rich and complex: it has evolved to support the capture of fine-grained metadata about:
- The many names, in many languages and several scripts, by which a single site or person may be known.
- The Types, Usages and Building Materials of a given site, along with its description, location, events during its existence, and technical details.
- The relationships between sites, including child, parent and sibling sites, and between sites and media, collections, and authorities.
As a first step, we preserved the database (PostgreSQL) and data model of the site (Ruby on Rails ActiveRecord models), while removing the presentation logic from the Rails application altogether. We updated the entire application from Rails 3 to Rails 6, and the version of Ruby from 2.3 to 2.7.
Next, we moved to a new application architecture, in which the end user interfaces, for both content managers and end users, were build as standalone React.js applications, accessing the data they need through a REST API, built using our resource-api gem, served by the Rails application, and hosted on Heroku.
The change in architecture allowed us more fully to decouple the data of each record in the archive from its representation, and to create entirely separate interfaces, hosted and served from different platforms, to meet the divergent needs of the two main audiences.
We used that flexibility to build the end user interface using Next.js, a website building framework based on React.js, with a focus on performance, and an ability to statically render all pages on a website before they’re deployed. That static rendering was a cornerstone in our efforts to improve performance for end users worldwide. The Vercel platform on which the site is hosted handles a range of tasks, from regenerating pages when they’re updated in the CMS, to optimizing images at request time, and reporting on the performance of the site.
We also used our in-house, open source, user interface toolset, based on Semantic UI, for all aspects of the front end. Our react-components library makes it easy for us to build both mobile and desktop friendly interfaces with the same set of controls. As we build more and more projects with that toolset, it gets richer and more mature, and makes it faster for us to develop features for projects with fewer bugs, and lower cost, and quicker time to deployment.
Results
The new Archnet site is fast, easy to use, and its new architecture puts the site and the project on a solid foundation, on which to build for years to come.
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