San Francisco Opera Archive
Building an exhaustive database to preserve treasured data.
2,000+ Productions Migrated
15 Taxonomy Families
Client Overview
Opera is a uniquely captivating and emotionally compelling art form. The San Francisco Opera’s mission is to unite growing audiences in experiencing its transformative power.
Services provided
The challenge
After 100+ years and 6,300+ performances, the SF Opera had built a rich archive of historical data on productions, cast, crew, and more. While all of it was available online to the press and public at the click of a button, it was hosted on outdated technology that was prone to outages, difficult for editors to use, and vulnerable to security risks.
To keep the data secure, the SF Opera team made the platform temporarily inaccessible to the public while they determined the next steps, resulting in fewer site visits.
They needed to move to a new platform that used best practices for data management, could be scaled to meet future needs, and — above all else — was secure.
The process
Entity Reference Diagram
We created a complex diagram illustrating how content was organized in their original database, and how that content would be reorganized on the new site.
Wireframes
The wireframes provided direction and inspiration for SF Opera to shape the user experience for visitors coming to the site.
The solution
We helped the SF Opera team transform their archive site within Drupal 10, ensuring scalability, security, and adherence to data management best practices.
Given the complexity of migrating over 6,300 performances and 15 taxonomies with thousands of terms, cleaning up the data was crucial. We analyzed the existing database, restructured disconnected data into a relational format, and migrated several databases into the new system. We also reorganized it to create a sustainable content ecosystem for future growth.
Additionally, we designed a user-friendly experience to help users of all technical levels easily access key historical data.
Key features
Migration
We migrated over 2,000 productions, 15 taxonomies with thousands of individual terms, and 9,000+ media assets.
Data Organization and Clean Up
We thoroughly cleaned the data, worked through multiple spreadsheets to identify relational information, and mapped fields for consolidation into a relational database. We also streamlined the data entry process by creating a single entry point.
Updated User Experience
Taking creative direction from the main SF Opera site, we created an improved user experience (UX) so visitors would find the information they needed quickly.
The result
Visitors now enjoy an intuitive and visually appealing platform to easily access historical data on past productions. Thanks to its scalability and security, this upgraded archive will continue to serve audiences for many years and performances to come.
