Digital communications agency, Reading Room, has redeveloped the National Archives of Australia (NAA) website to give the public online access to fascinating records on the history of Australia.

NAA selected Reading Room as its development partner from a competitive open tender process. Reading Room managed the technical development of the content management system, the conversion of static pages to XML and the integration of the front-end designs. Reading Room also ensured that the website was AA compliant.

Tom Voirol, managing director, Reading Room Australia said the main objective of the redevelopment was to implement a content management system to improve the ability of NAA to publish and maintain the website.

"When Reading Room was appointed in March 2006, the NAA website was six years old, contained 13,000 pages and was completely maintained in Dreamweaver. The redevelopment involved converting the 13,000 pages into XML based Tridion and publishing out to the website," he said.

Brad Headland, Website manager, National Archives of Australia, said Reading Room submitted the best tender response that most closely met the National Archives of Australia's requirements.

“It understood that the Archives delivered 93 percent of its access online and recommended Tridion Content Management System as the most suitable system to meet our needs," he said.

Tridion’s product provides complete web content management and content delivery capabilities, focusing on ease-of-use for all content contributors, site managers and power users.

The next phase of the NAA website will be to implement Tridion's Content Broker feature with the objective to enrich the front-end of the site further.