Rutgers Center for State Health Policy | Website and Publications System
A new website and publications system for New Jersey's state health policy research center
Founded with major funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Rutgers Center for State Health Policy (CSHP) conducts impartial research and policy analysis on New Jersey's most pressing health issues, from access and coverage to long-term care and population health. Its audience is specialized: state and federal policymakers, legislative staff, academic researchers, community health organizations, and funders. CSHP wanted a modern website that made its research easier to search and its content easier to update. Its publications catalog lived in EndNote, separate from the website.
After Zivtech designed and built the iPHD website for CSHP, the Center returned to Zivtech to redesign its main site. The engagement covered strategy, design, and technical planning, followed by a full rebuild of cshp.rutgers.edu and a custom document management system (DMS) for CSHP's publications.
Meeting specialized research needs inside a university framework
CSHP's site had to follow Rutgers branding and accessibility standards and run on the Rutgers Core Component Library (RCCL), the university's shared Drupal distribution. The RCCL provides approved content types and components, but CSHP's content needed more: projects that connect investigators, funders, focus areas, and publications; a searchable catalog of roughly 1,000 publications; and job postings, commentary, and media mentions.
Publications posed the biggest challenge. CSHP's information management staff maintain detailed records with more than 80 metadata fields. They needed a system that could store those records, control which fields and files are public, and export citations, while feeding the public website. With repository platforms under consideration, Zivtech compared document management options before recommending a custom Drupal solution.
A research-first website and a custom system to manage it
Zivtech began with discovery: a content audit, analytics and heatmap review, a stakeholder survey, workshops with CSHP leadership, and a technical review of the RCCL. Because CSHP had to work within the RCCL's approved components, Zivtech recreated those components in Figma. That let the team prototype page designs quickly and see where the library fell short. The strategy brief, content model, sitemap, page tables, and clickable prototype that followed gave CSHP a clear plan before development began.
Zivtech then rebuilt cshp.rutgers.edu in Drupal 10 on the RCCL. The team added custom content types for projects, job postings, and insights and commentary, along with 10 custom views and new components the library didn't provide. Visitors can filter projects and publications by focus area, project, publication type, author, and year. An editorial workflow lets staff save drafts and receive notifications before publishing, and a Constant Contact integration powers the mailing list sign-up. Zivtech tested the site against Section 508 and WCAG 2.2 AA, wrote content editor documentation, and trained CSHP's team.
Alongside the website, Zivtech built the DMS as a separate Drupal site to replace EndNote. Zivtech migrated CSHP's publication records from an XML export and organized them with 14 taxonomies. Solr-powered faceted search, field-level permissions, automatic record numbering and file naming, and bibliography export in APA, NLM, and Vancouver formats give staff one place to manage CSHP's research. A custom REST API and connector module feed the catalog to the public website, so publications are managed once and appear on the site automatically.
A quarter century of research, searchable in one place
CSHP launched its redesigned website and DMS together. Policymakers, researchers, and partners can now search more than 25 years of CSHP publications by focus area, author, project, and year, and project pages connect directly to their related research. CSHP's staff manage publication records in a system built around their workflow, and the communications team updates the site directly.
Call to action
Need a research website and publications system that work as one? Contact us at sales@zivtech.com to start the conversation.
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