SCONUL

The Challenge

SCONUL — the Society of College, National and University Libraries — serves as the representative body for UK higher education and national libraries. They needed digital tools to manage institutional data, user accounts, and reporting across their membership of UK universities and colleges. The existing systems couldn't handle the complexity of aggregating data from multiple library and educational data sources, and the member-facing tools needed to support a diverse range of institutional users with different access levels and reporting requirements.

Our Approach

• Built on Drupal as the core CMS platform, extending it with custom modules for institutional data management, member reporting, and user access control.
• Integrated with external library and educational data sources to aggregate sector-wide statistics, benchmarking data, and resource information into a single searchable platform.
• Designed role-based user management serving different institutional needs — from individual library staff accessing benchmarking reports to senior managers reviewing sector-wide trends.
• Developed structured knowledge base tools with clear information architecture, enabling institutions to search, filter, and export data relevant to their operations.
• Built reporting interfaces that transform complex multi-source data into actionable insights for UK higher education institutions.

The Outcome

SCONUL gained a unified platform serving their membership of UK higher education institutions — replacing fragmented processes with structured, searchable digital infrastructure. Institutional data from multiple library and educational sources is now aggregated, reportable, and accessible to members with appropriate role-based access. The Drupal-based platform is maintained and extended by Pendulum as requirements evolve.

Key Takeaways

• Public sector data platforms require careful access control — different institutions need different views of the same underlying data.
• Integrating with external educational data sources demands robust ingestion pipelines and clear data mapping.
• Drupal remains a strong choice for public sector platforms where content management, user roles, and extensibility all matter.