How Amsterdam's public library modernized its digital experience with Prepr

The Openbare Bibliotheek Amsterdam (OBA) is one of the largest and most well-known public libraries in the Netherlands. With over 28 branches, a catalog of more than 3.2 million titles, and a diverse audience ranging from children discovering books for the first time, to students, professionals, and elderly readers, OBA plays a central role in the cultural and educational life of Amsterdam.

With its commitment to accessibility, education, and inclusivity, OBA recognized that its digital experience needed to reflect the same level of quality and flexibility it offered on-site. The old website was outdated, difficult to navigate, and no longer aligned with OBA’s strategic vision for digital engagement.

In 2024, the organization set out to modernize its digital presence, aiming to create a dynamic, personalized, and unified online platform that could support its wide-ranging audiences and services.

To deliver this transformation, Amsterdam's library partnered with Greenberry, a Dutch digital agency, for the design and development of the new platform. As part of the replatforming process, Greenberry and OBA selected Prepr as the CMS, following a competitive pitch process where Prepr was chosen over other headless solutions.

Prepr was ultimately selected for its feature set, which aligned directly with OBA’s digital goals. Most importantly, Prepr stood out for its native personalization capabilities, which allow content to be dynamically adapted to different user segments based on behavior, source (like UTM tags), or data from an external identity platform such as a member login.

With Prepr at the heart of the platform, the team built a completely new architecture using Next.js on the frontend and Prepr as the headless CMS. This headless setup gave OBA full flexibility over the presentation layer, while allowing content teams to manage information and media efficiently.

Several core Prepr features were instrumental in supporting the build:

• Role-based access control (RBAC) allowed for the creation of custom user roles, ensuring that different teams could manage content securely and efficiently.
• The CMS supported a live preview environment (Visual editor), enabling editors to visualize how content would appear before publishing.
• Through structured content modeling, editors could create templates and reuse content blocks across the site, reducing duplication and speeding up workflows.
• Prepr enabled tagging and segmentation, helping the team prepare for future personalization strategies.
• Support for multilingual content was built directly into the schema, critical for a public institution in a diverse city like Amsterdam.
• The CMS easily integrates with external systems like Frontify for asset management and Typeform for forms, all through Prepr’s API and remote content source functionality.
• Content migration from the previous system was also streamlined using Prepr’s API capabilities, allowing for the automated transfer of large volumes of content items.

The new setup was built to be modular, scalable, and future-ready, enabling OBA to keep evolving without needing to reinvent its platform again.

As of June 2025, the new OBA website is officially live.

While it’s too early to report long-term metrics, the immediate impact is already visible. The new platform is faster, more reliable, and offers a far cleaner editorial experience for the OBA team. Content can now be scheduled, tagged, segmented, and previewed, all from one centralized place. This significantly improves internal workflows and positions the organization to roll out personalized user journeys in the near future.

Importantly, the new website consolidates all content, events, collections, locations, and educational materials, into a single cohesive environment. This marks a major improvement from the previous disconnected experiences.

This replatforming project was a strategic digital transformation for Amsterdam's public library. With Prepr, OBA now has the infrastructure to create dynamic, personalized experiences for its audiences, manage content efficiently, and scale its platform with ease.

This case highlights how Prepr supports organizations in delivering relevant, data-informed digital experiences that respect the complexity of their user base. With a modern stack, robust CMS capabilities, and built-in personalization, OBA’s new platform sets the benchmark for what a public library’s digital experience should be.

The key driver for this transformation was the need to replace a slow and fragmented legacy platform that hindered both performance and content delivery. The existing CMS infrastructure could not support the level of agility, scalability, or personalization OBA envisioned.

Several pain points emerged during the initial evaluation:

• The website’s performance was poor, which negatively impacted user experience.
• Content management was fragmented across multiple environments, which led to inefficiencies and inconsistent journeys for users.
• There was no capacity for personalization, making it difficult to address the needs of distinct target groups like children, young adults, or seniors.
• The tech stack lacked scalability, limiting OBA’s ability to evolve digitally.

It became clear that Amsterdam's public library needed a future-proof, scalable platform that could support a wide variety of content, allow editorial control, and enable more relevant user experiences based on behavior and segment.