New programming of the Thuringia archive portal with PHP, MySQL, Zend Framework and Elasticsearch

Archive portal Thuringia access to 150 connected archives

The Thuringia Archive Portal is a project of the Thuringia State Archive - Main State Archive Weimar in cooperation with the state and non-state archives of Thuringia. The archive portal currently provides access to approx. 150 archives, approx. 14,163 holdings and approx. 1.3 million archival items, which are presented with general information on the respective institution as well as specialist information on the archive holdings and archival collections.

The Thuringia archive portal is aimed at the historically interested public, scientific and local history research, private individuals and companies looking for written evidence to clarify legal issues, media representatives, administrative staff and interested employees from archives and related specialist areas.

eWorks was commissioned with the graphic and technical design for the relaunch of the "Archivportal Thüringen". The aim was to develop a new, high-performance and modern research portal. The search engine Elasticsearch was used as the heart of the archive, which enables the user of the archive portal to access the archive content quickly and efficiently and is very well suited for such an application. Elasticsearch indexes the text content in the background and provides a query interface for the front end.

The front end of the website is completely implemented in responsive design in HTML5 and CSS3 so that the archive portal can also be easily operated with mobile devices. Various pages can be conveniently noted for later reference via a watch list function. The backend was developed on the basis of the PHP programming language and Zend Framework for administering the portal's holdings. Various statistical reports from Piwik / Matomo data sources were also programmed here. Last but not least, the archive portal is multilingual in German and English.