Projects
Irish Newspaper Archives has been developed to provide online, digital access to Ireland's rich newspaper heritage. The microfilm archive of National MicroMedia Ltd is the backbone of the INA resource. Our online newspaper site dates from 1763 to current. It comprises of over 55 daily and regional titles. The project posed a unique challenge: to create an umbrella site to house regional and daily titles with the approval of each proprietor. Our fifty-years of service and our trusting relationship within the Irish newspaper industry enabled our company to realise this incredible on-line tool. With the full backing and co-operation of the newspapers, we set about transforming the largest privately owned analogue archive Into a searchable, retrievable database. With 55 titles signed up to the project and with the master negative film In our possession. We set about the digitization and indexing of our archive.
The website has proven to be very successiful and we are now actively looking to expand aboard.
Case Studies
National MicroMedia longevity is part due to it's client focus orientation and development of innovative solutions to meet our client's document management requirements. This innovation is captured through our constant reinvestment in the latest technology and knowledge.
The case studies below are only a snap shot of some of capabilities.
Case Study 1: Irish Newspaper archive, demonstrates our capabilities to develop a web based archive system from both hardcopy and microfilm archives.
Case Study 2: Waterways Ireland, demonstrates our wide range scanning capabilities as we had to scan a mix of bound and unbound documents ranging from A5 all the way to A0+.
Case Study 3: Garland & Partners, demonstrates our ability to scan general office files into a word searchable DM system and develop a database of technical drawings from both legacy hardcopy and microfilm sources.
"Preserve Don't Presume"
This project is a good example of a project which demonstrates all our scanning expertise, as the documents themselves are greatly varied in nature. The titles deeds consist of
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Multi-page land transfer deeds which are usually A3-A4 in size and stapled or bound. Many are DL folded.
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Large format title deeds, dating from late 18th century onwards. These are generally on velum, folded and A2 or greater in size.
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Other maps and documents which range in size from A0+ and larger.
The maps and deeds were imaged at preservation resolution (300 DPI) for long term storage. Each file is captured and saved as an uncompressed 24-bit TIF
file to fulfil legal admissibility.
We also provide a surrogate set of images to be supplied as compressed JPG files (72 DPI web resolution) and as multi-page PDF files for each deed.
Furthermore we provide a full set of both black/white and colour pdfs for every deed and image.
As with many of our clients Garland have been with us for the last fifty years. We were the first document management company to introduce microfilm to Ireland and Garland were early adopters of this technology.
As such they have built up a huge archive of microfilm drawings. This microfilm archive had served them well, however their management was looking to deliver a more accessible archive to their various branch offices. They also had a large legacy archive of over 15,000 hardcopy architectural drawings.
NML digitised all their analogue drawings, including the introduction of XML metadata. These fully indexed drawings were than delivered on the Zylab document management system. The archive to date numbers over 15,000 A0 images.