Thousands of pages, on screen in two seconds

A bound run of a newspaper, a parish register, a box of correspondence scanned page by page: the items an archive cares about most are often the largest. MediaINFO Digital Library has always shown an item's pages on one continuous canvas, so a reader can see the whole of it and zoom into any page. With thousands of pages, seeing the whole of it took patience. Not any more.

In October 2026 we measured the same item of 2,350 pages, opened from a running session, with the previous generation of the viewer and with the new one:

	Previous generation	Now
Every page on screen	244.8 seconds	2.3 seconds
Data sent to the reader's browser	55.0 MB	0.55 MB

That is a hundred times faster, with a hundredth of the data. The reader opens the item and the whole of it is there: every page in its place, ready to zoom into, with the detail of each page arriving as they move in on it.

The hundredth matters as much as the seconds. A reading room on a slow line, a researcher on a phone, a library serving many readers at once: all of them now open the largest items in the time it used to take to open a small one.

Nothing changes in how a collection is prepared or catalogued. The pages are the same pages; they simply arrive at once.

Measured on 9 October 2026 on an item of 2,350 pages, opened from a running session; the previous generation was measured on 6 October 2026. The time is from opening the item to every page on screen.