BritishDan

Thanks for this suggestion. Do you have an example of either solution? Both seem pretty complex and it would be great to see what the end result would look like and its usability before trying to create one. 

Do you have any other possible solutions? There seems to be lots of plugins for WordPress but I can't find much for Squarespace

Hi everyone, 

My client is a research organisation that produces a lot of PDF reports. As such, they want a library feature on their Squarespace site that will allow visitors to see all of their PDF reports, download them, categorise them, and search them. 

Does anyone know if this is possible and if so, what are the solutions? 

Thanks so much 🙂

I've amended the code here:
<style> .blog-item-wrapper .blog-item-author-date-wrapper, .blog-item-wrapper .blog-meta-item--categories { display: none !important; } </style>  

I would try adding this code to the "Post Blog Item Code Injection" in the page settings "Advanced" to have it just effect the portfolio "blogs":
<style> .blog-item-wrapper .blog-item-author-date-wrapper { display: none !important; } </style>

This appears to be an old problem. My research is that unfortunately with typical redirect managers such as the one in Squarespace you can't do a 301 redirect with pdfs. You can however change the link on the old site to any pdf to the matching pdf on the new site. This means leaving the old one up which may not be what you want to do. This forum thread may help you:
https://community.adobe.com/t5/business-catalyst-discussions-read-only/how-to-url-redirect-a-pdf/m-p/4658189
This is a second possible solution but a bit complicated:
https://www.lockedownseo.com/301-redirect-pdf-wordpress/
If you read the comments you will find that renaming the links on the old location to the matching file's location on the second site is the most common way of doing it, it is not really a redirect of course. I personally would redirect all the pdfs on the old site to a page on the new site with an explanation of why they got there. This should allow you to take down the old site or work for you if the site is already down. 

I would suggest Airtable for the storage of the files and then embedding on the site. Notion can also be used, but it requires a third party to embed, and they would need the pro or business version, which are both paid.
Embed Notion is the service to use with Notion.

Squarespace is exceptionally good for on-page content but it isn't great for creating libraries of files. It's a serverless platform with no access to a 'filesystem' so you can only upload files one-at-time. Also, the built-in search tool isn't working very well either.
Don't get me wrong, it's a great visual platform and can be used for a document library but it will be more time-consuming to manage than other dedicated platforms. For example, to display one of the PDFs on the website, you'll need to add an on-page link by typing the document title or adding an image for it, upload the actual file, select the file from the list, click apply, click save. You'll then need to repeat this process for each individual file. It's fine for adding 3 files every now and then but it's a lot of work to add a library of 50. That said, people have created entire libraries using on-page content and PDFs, as The Nature Institute did - here's an example. 
For more information about Squarespace features, see uploading and managing files.
You could embed a third party service to manage your documents but, unless you're good at writing code, they generally don't look as good as Squarespace and you'll be totally reliant on the third party service to provide you with search or filtering capabilities and analytics information.
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