British Record Shop Archive

This one really is a labour of love.

As part of the discovery process for the Childcare History website our friends at On the Record gave us list of archive sites they liked. One of these was the British Record Shop Archive (BRSA). 

When we check the site we noticed that on the homepage was a notice that after building up the archive on his own over the last decade, Léon, the founder of the site, was planning to give up and the archive would be coming down in the next month unless a new home could be found for it.

Obviously we couldn't let that happen.

So, we got in touch with Léon and agreed that we would take over the hosting and move the content over to a new content management system pro-bono.

Technicallly this was no easy task. The old site had been built using an online website building service and new shops had just been added as new pages with no real underlying database and no sensible way to export the site. We ended up writing scipts to scrape the old site and then parse the HTML to extract the content, comments and images which we could then import into a proper database structure.

Once we had the data over we were able to build out the design and start developing new functioanlity such as geo-tagging all of the shops to display on a spiffing new map.

This is very much an ongoing project. There are currently about 5,000 shops listed on the site but new ones are being submitted daily.  

Numbers of visitors and community involvement are way up, and having a user friendly system has given Léon new enthusaism and he's still working away on the site alongside us and the new volunteers who have joined the project. If you want to join them then you can get in touch via the website