brightsolid delivers one of the UK's largest-ever digitisation projects from Dundee Data Centres
The British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk), a collaboration between brightsolid and the British Library, transforms the way that people use historical newspapers to find out about their past with four million pages of the British Library's newspaper collection online for the first time.
It received significant media attention from major UK and US television networks, including the BBC and CBS, along with over 400 news outlets around the world.
brightsolid Online Technology confirmed that the first day saw over 1.2 million searches across the 4 million pages available, drawn mainly from 19th Century regional newspapers. The second phase of the project has already started, and will see a further 36 million pages made available over the next 9 years - at a rate of 8,000 pages (enough newspaper to cover a football pitch) every working day.
The digital archive is hosted from brightsolid's state of the art data centres in Dundee. These world-class facilities are used by many of the UK's leading organisations, including FTSE100 companies and major government departments, to host their IT infrastructure in a highly secure and reliable environment.
brightsolid Online Technology was chosen by the British Library due to its track record of delivering on projects of this scale, such as the digitisation of the historic 1911 Census and the hosting of Scotland's 2011 Census, which successfully operated under significant peak demands while protecting the nation's personal data. The technical challenges of the British Newspaper Archive have been met by the brightsolid team in Dundee and London who have ensured that the project was delivered within budget and on schedule.
The British Newspaper Archive is fully searchable and uses the latest digitisation techniques, including Optical Character Recognition software, which offers extensive image enhancement and a highly automated procedure for extracting text, structure recognition and descriptive metadata. The scanners used in the process make it possible to digitise even the most fragile material into the highest quality digital images.
Over 500 terabytes of storage is used to store the archive data at launch and this has been designed to up-scale with the continued growth in the archive: 120,000 stories will be added every working day. The latest tiered storage techniques are used with a combination of SATA and Solid State Drives to store the archive and run the site while ensuring the highest levels of security of personal data.
Richard Higgs, Managing Director of brightsolid Online Technology, commented: "The successful delivery of this unique project has involved some of the latest technical innovations to help bring history to life. The brightsolid solution coped brilliantly with the significant demand of the first day, and that seamless launch is a credit to the hard work put in by the team.
The British Library joins over 2000 organisations who securely host their business critical applications from our Dundee facilities."
