Public Record Office Victoria
600,000 digital records, from 1836.
The Public Record Office Victoria (PROV) manages the physical and digital archives of the State Government in Victoria. The collection dates to the earliest days of European settlement in Melbourne, Acts of Parliament, records of people in care, historic plans and records about the state's development across more than 180 years.
These are the most important records in the state, and they need long-term preservation.PROV is a vital source for family historians, professional researchers, academics and government agencies.
The website is how the public searches, orders and uses records in the collection.
A platform stitched together from many systems.
Drupal CMS.
Large-scale Drupal platform powering the website's content, navigation and editorial workflows.
Public and closed searches.
Separate Solr indexes serve the public-facing and authorised users’ search across PROV’s collection records.
Digital Asset Management.
Fedora Commons manages the digital archive itself — the records, images and files behind every record.
Order and Pay.
An Opencart-powered Request and Pay service lets users order records and request services.
SSO and Keycloak.
Single Sign-On with Keycloak provides granular user access management across the platform.
Amazon EKS
Custom-built Kubernetes production and staging clusters on AWS.
Stabilising the platform first.
The first challenge was to stabilise the website, improve performance and eliminate outages — while staying within the existing AWS infrastructure that linked to search, user management and digital asset management.
Our DevOps team reconfigured the hosting on a modern auto-scalable Kubernetes stack. That foundation supported the Drupal CMS work that followed. A technical deep dive then revealed the root issue: a dual-frontend website operating on a single codebase and database. Once that was untangled, the platform settled.
Eighteen months on remediation, before features.
During the onboarding phase, we devised a remediation plan, ran a risk assessment and gave PROV a prioritised backlog ranked by severity, impact and budget fit.
Eager as we were to delve into UX, interface and feature work, we dedicated the first 18 months to remediation — security, performance and accessibility — before any of the visible improvements began.
What we shipped across the partnership.
Seven years of continuous improvement, with each release stabilising the platform and lifting the public experience.
Major Drupal upgrades delivered without disrupting existing services or PROV's digital presence.
Ongoing support and assistance across the platform, with 400+ support requests resolved.
Design updates for an enhanced user experience across the most-used parts of the site.
User management controls for closed-records management.
Beta search promoted to primary as the main search tool, lifting the day-to-day experience.
Optimised search in collaboration with Apache Solr, surfacing records faster and more accurately.
Order and Pay system developed for users requesting records and services.
Box and Cart system for user convenience across record orders.
Catalogue pages enhanced for easy navigation and improved usability.
Koori Index of Names (KIN) Portal a restricted cultural heritage search portal for First Nations records.
Photo Wall delivered a visual search and browsing interface across PROV's photographic collection
AWS EKS clusters production and staging Kubernetes clusters with ALB, Route 53, CI/CD pipeline via Helm and CloudFront.
Refreshing the design, with budget in mind.
With the foundational work complete, PROV turned its focus to refreshing the website design and bringing the experience in line with other leading archives organisations across Australia. What began as a homepage refresh quickly evolved into a broader UX and UI uplift, creating stronger visual consistency across the site and a more cohesive experience for users.
Working within budget constraints, we delivered an initial phase focused on the site’s most heavily used components. The result was a series of high impact improvements, supported by a practical UX and UI framework that has since guided every ongoing design decision across the platform.
From support contract to partnership.
Over seven years, the relationship has evolved from support and maintenance into a close working partnership. The effort invested in stabilising and modernising the platform created the foundation for ongoing feature development, design improvements and integration enhancements that continue to shape the experience for PROV users every day.
The partnership continues to grow alongside the platform itself. Today, the opportunity is to work even more closely with the PROV team, continuously improving, refining and delivering the next phase of the experience together.
