The challenge
Adam Matthew Digital is a scholarly publisher making rare manuscripts and books available on the internet as a resource for researchers in the humanities and social sciences. They came to us to help them with their Women in the National Archives project.
They wanted to be able to tag 6,000 scanned images so they were searchable online, as well as making documents available as PDFs so users could download a single page, a group of pages, or an entire document. AMD also needed to manage user access using web-based admin tools, and the tools had to be integrated with the Eduserv Athens Access Management system.
The solution
We decided that the first priority was to give AMD an office-based application so they could begin the enormous task of scanning and tagging the printed materials they wanted to get online – ending up with 6,000 PDFs.
Then we moved on to the web based tools that would give AMD ongoing editorial control over its online content. Our choice of software was Macromedia Contribute because of its simple user interface and low cost.
It was essential that users could search powerfully and quickly through the vast resources we were helping AMD publish. We used both Microsoft’s IndexServer and SQL Server 2000 in combination, so users could carry out full text searches on all descriptions and keywords, and also take advantage of useful features such as word stemming, word highlighting and Boolean searches.
As for hosting, we provided that with the help of our partner Rackspace. In fact, as their requirements continue to expand, Adam Matthew Digital now have their own dedicated hosting solution with Rackspace.
The result
The Women in the National Archives project launched on time and on budget. AMD are so pleased that they’ve already commissioned new online projects from us which will follow the same format. Success!