Gilbane Research Report - Digital Magazine Editions - (Page 58) Digital Magazine and Newspaper Editions: Best Practice Cases The Guardian: Archiving Modern History Background The Guardian is a unique voice with an international reach. The newspaper is one of the UK’s leading daily titles, and the Guardian.co.uk Web site — voted the best newspaper site in the world — now delivers the Guardian’s liberal journalism to a global audience. The Guardian grew from regional roots in Manchester to become a leading national newspaper. Following the international success of its Web site, the Guardian now aims to become the world’s leading liberal voice. Torsten de Riese, Business Development Manager, was instrumental in managing the archive project. Olive Software (www.olivesoftware.com) is a leading provider of digital edition and digital archiving solutions for the publishing industry, with more than 250 publishers and 650 titles worldwide. Olive’s solutions enable newspapers, magazines, and other content publishers to cut printing and distribution costs, boost online traffic, and create new markets and revenue streams. The Challenge The Guardian Web site is widely considered to be among the best newspaper Web sites in the world. Using a Web-first editorial strategy, breaking news is first published on their Web site and is later published in the newspaper. As a story evolves, different versions will appear on the Web and in print. As part of their innovative Web strategy, Guardian management decided to create a comprehensive archive of more than 1,000,000 pages of their flagship newspapers — The Guardian and The Observer. The content to be archived existed in bound print editions and microfilm. Meeting the Challenge Creating a massive archive is a daunting task. To find the best vendor, The Guardian sent a request for proposal to ten potential vendors. They were hoping to find a vendor that offered the sophisticated algorithms necessary to scan and structure the content into an XML database, an automated quality assurance process to correct the inevitable errors arising from flawed source materials, and a publishing platform to present the content to readers. Olive Software was the winning vendor. Their deep XML knowledge and experience in developing large archives proved an effective combination as the project got under way. Together, The Guardian and Olive worked through over one million pages of source newspaper content. Most errors stemmed from missing issues or illegible source materials. The Guardian staff worked conscientiously to find the missing materials. The archive was tested in a controlled set of libraries in the UK. ©2008 Gilbane Group, Inc. 58 http://gilbane.com http://Guardian.co.uk http://www.olivesoftware.com http://gilbane.com
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