GCN

GCN Archive

Strategy · Design · Development

The challenge

GCN wanted to make the first decade of Ireland’s national LGBTQ+ magazine freely available online. Its early editions held a rich record of the community’s lives, organisations and activism, but the original newspapers were stored away and hard for the public to reach. With over 3,300 pages digitised, the job was to turn a large collection of scans and metadata into something people could navigate and search, on a foundation a small team could keep adding to. After our work together on the Prism digital exhibition, GCN asked us to plan and build the archive alongside its project team and art director, Dave Darcy.

The approach

With Stefano Pappalardo, archive project lead Han Tiernan and Dave Darcy, we worked out the site’s structure and how a large collection could be made simple to explore. We went through the archive’s metadata and categories, researched hosting for the digitised magazines, connected the team’s tagging workflow to the site’s search, and built the site in Webflow with live search and navigation between the archive’s views. Building on Dave Darcy / One Strong Arm’s designs and identity, we added design work across the Archive, Search, Spotlight and Reflections pages, and the structure brought historical editions, selected articles and new editorial together, including ‘Reflections on the Archive’, commissioned pieces that connect the magazine’s history with contemporary perspectives.

The result

The GCN Archive launched on 19 June 2023 with 113 issues from the magazine’s first decade free to explore, by year or by tagged keyword. Stefano reported overwhelmingly positive feedback, from community organisations tracing their earlier work to readers rediscovering themselves and their friends in its pages, and the structure behind the site gave GCN a foundation for adding further editions and commissioning more reflections: a public resource with room to grow, bringing previously hard-to-reach history into view.

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The archive website absolutely exceeded our expectations and our goals. The first goal was to make the archive accessible, which it is, and it works really, really well. But also, the work that Aidan has done will allow us to continue to expand on the archive. He has put together an infrastructure that’s going to make it a lot easier for us to expand and add new elements – to make sure that the archive doesn’t stay a static website, but keeps evolving, keeps changing.

Stefano Pappalardo

Head of Digital, Marketing & Development, GCN

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