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.
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