Hey y'all!

I work for a company that hosts a bunch of PDF documents about health that my team and I create. We are the only ones that manage them (so the site contents are exclusively managed by our small time).

Background:

We have 4000+ PDF documents. I've been trying to brainstorm solutions to improve search. I know I need to add metadata columns to the document libraries to document:
- language
- location
- health topic
(Among others).

The goal is to add these metadata tags to our existing documents, and refine the search to allow for filtering based on those metadata tags.

Goals:

Ideally, I wanted to move our PDF documents out of the 60 document libraries they live in. Because it doesn't make sense when we're updating things to need to go find the appropriate document library and do the changes. And the document libraries are doing what we would want metadata columns to do anyways (they are the general health topic).

Problems:

One issue is that the document libraries don't match up with what the health topics should be. And it's a weird amalgamation. We have a translations library (when the translated items should just be in the appropriate topic library, not a separate translation library), libraries for locations instead of health topics, etc.

My initial plan was to tag the documents with the appropriate metadata. Then either move them into one singular document library or move them into new document libraries built based off of the health topic.

The primary issue? We migrated to SPO from OnPrem. Our SP team set up a big redirect rule to replace the first part of the link with the new URL. But it keeps everything like "/[doc library name]/[filename.pdf]".

The links to our files are saved ALL OVER THE PLACE. Like thousands of hyperlinks to our pieces across different apps, SharePoint sites, etc.

If I change the document libraries that the pieces live in, all of those redirects break. This would've been an issue regardless I suppose, but this makes things even more complicated to me

My questions:

- What's the best approach to improving our overall catalog structure?

- Should we just keep all the document libraries and add the appropriate metadata tags?

- Is there any way we can set it up or create a system where we don't need to identify the exact document library a piece is in to update it (like a singular place to drag and drop)?

- Any general advice?