Literary Database of Quebec English-Language Authors

Goals

The literary database needed to not only move to a new content management system but also be a platform that QWF was proud to share while promoting Quebec literature throughout Canada and abroad

extending the existing QWF brand for the database website to clearly communicate it is a project run by this organization
ensuring wide reach by focusing on accessibility and ease of use
migrating nearly 2400 records with their relevant meta data and author relationships from a completely different content management system
empowering the internal team to take full ownership of their new website by making sure it's easy to maintain

What we did

Information architecture & UX
Web design
WordPress & front-end web development
Accessibility compliance & consulting

Project team

Sasha Endoh,
Melissa Jean Clark

Literary community

Cataloguing & promoting Quebec’s English-language literature

The literary database is a project of Quebec Writers’ Federation (QWF), originally launched in 2006 as part of the year-long celebration of Montreal as UNESCO’s 2006 World Book Capital. It features winners, finalists, and those shortlisted for the QWF awards given to the best books by Quebec English-language authors of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, first books, children’s/young adult literature, and playwriting.

The original website for this project was challenging to update and the original developer wasn’t able to provide support anymore. Having worked with QWF on their main website, their team reached out to us to migrate this database of over 2000 books to WordPress and redesign it to make it a part of the QWF brand.

New site

Well-organized and welcoming research tool for exploring literary excellence

The QWF team had a very clear idea of the direction they wanted to go in with this website’s redesign and we’ve worked with their brand enough to know how to apply it visually. We kept to consistent approaches for ordering archive screens and offered a simple way to navigate through them. Mapping metadata from 2000+ titles, their authors, and translators as well as a multi-tier award status and prize system while presenting this information in an easy-to-digest way was the biggest challenge for the UX and UI design of this website. Focusing on book covers and author headshots, we let the content of each page breathe while being informative.

We didn’t just migrate the data to a new WordPress installation, we also created an import process for the client to continue using each year rather than having to enter that year’s titles by hand.

The final result is a welcoming and accessible website that allows visitors to easily locate specific records in the catalogue as well as explore collections curated by the QWF staff. For those in Montreal, a link to the Attwater Library record to checkout physical copies for available titles is automatically shown based on ISBN number, connecting readers to the catalogue in person.