The State Library Has a New Website

The State Library’s website has recently changed. Most of the content from the Government and Heritage Library can now be found under Research on the new site.  There are separate sections for resources relevant to Government Information (including the state publications Clearinghouse), Educators and Students, and Genealogy.  Resources used for research and tools to assist with your research can now be found on our Information for Researchers page.

Author: Irene Patrick, Library & Info Mgmt. Systems Librarian

You have probably noticed that the State Library’s website has recently changed.  This change is part of a much larger project that affects a majority of North Carolina’s state government websites.

Background

Many of the NC state government websites are now running on the open-source Drupal content management system.  Most of these sites, including the State Library’s website, started on Drupal 7 and need to be migrated to Drupal 8. This migration is important because Drupal 7 will reach what developers call its “end of life” in November 2022.

So what does the migration process look like?  For Drupal, it is often described as similar to a train riding on tracks.  We can see the tracks are ending up ahead, so we need to move our content 'train' to the open set of tracks.  In our case, this has meant manually moving all our content to the new Drupal 8 system.

Image showing Drupal 6 on one train track, Drupal 7 on a second train track above Drupal 6, and a third train track at the top showing a train on the Drupal 8 track coming into the Drupal 9 station, and the track coming out of the station labelled Drupal 9
Drupal migration process.  Image courtesy Dries Buytaert.

Drupal has historically followed this 'moving the train to new tracks' implementation model for previous versions.  However, from Drupal 8 onward, the 'changing tracks' method will no longer be necessary.  In fact, our website will soon be moving to Drupal 9, without requiring much extra work on our part, and you will probably not even notice when it happens.

The New Website

While working on the content migration, we have also looked at the organization of the site and tried to improve the experience for our users.  Most of the content from the Government and Heritage Library can now be found under Research on the new site.  There are separate sections for resources relevant to Government Information (including the state publications Clearinghouse), Educators and Students, and Genealogy.  Resources used for research and tools to assist with your research can now be found on our Information for Researchers page.

Screen shot of the Research page on the State Library website
The Research page on the new website.

Our Digital Information Management section, including information about digital archiving, can be found at https://statelibrary.ncdcr.gov/research/digital-information-management.  Information about the Government and Heritage Library is now at https://statelibrary.ncdcr.gov/about-us/government-and-heritage-library.  As before, you can also find information from the Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped as well as information for North Carolina libraries from the Library Development section of the State Library.

Please visit our new site and let us know what you think. We would love to hear your feedback! 

 

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