Solutions
Built for the institutions that keep the record
MediaINFO Digital Library is one platform. What matters first differs by the kind of institution running it — the scale of the material, the languages in it, the rules around it. Six starting points, and the capabilities each one reaches for.
Six moments, one for each kind of institution this page is about, playing in turn. First, national libraries and archives: four whole front pages — one French, one German, one Spanish and one English, three of 21 July 1969 and one of 10 November 1919 — sort themselves by date and then by language, with the facets counting as they go. Second, museums and heritage: the photograph of the first flight at Kitty Hawk on 17 December 1903 under a lens, with two regions measured on it and named — the Wright Flyer, and Wilbur Wright running alongside. Third, universities and research: a typed sheet of 1919 beside the paragraph it quotes from Einstein’s own account of 1916, with the one passage the two share — 96 words — marked on both and measured at 99 per cent of the quoted paragraph. Fourth, publishers and newspaper archives: five pages collapse into a duplicates lane, the three that printed the same photograph of 21 July 1969 gathered into one group of three. Fifth, broadcasters and moving image: eight keyframes from the lunar surface under one of them, with the recording’s own transcript drawn as a chapter bar and the play head standing on “That's one small step for man”; nothing plays. Sixth, government and private collections: the scene dims and an air gap closes around it — it runs on your own servers, can run with no route to the outside network at all, and every action against a record is attributable. Under the scene, six links lead to the six sections of this page.
National libraries and archives
Millions of pages, many of them in scripts and languages the reading room no longer speaks.
A national collection is rarely one collection. It is a legal deposit run, a manuscript vault, a newspaper microfilm programme and thirty years of digitisation projects, each catalogued by a different generation to a different standard. The scans exist; what is missing is a way in. Text has to be recognised from the page — including from scripts the reading room no longer reads every day — the arrangement the institution already uses has to survive the move, and the record has to travel out to the aggregators that readers actually search.
Museums and heritage
Objects, photographs and documents that have to be shown as carefully as they are kept.
An object is only as public as its worst reproduction. A museum that has photographed its holdings at preservation resolution then finds it cannot show them: the files are too large for a web page, too valuable to release unwatermarked, and too flat to convey what the object is like in the hand. The material needs to be shown at full detail, with the conditions of use attached to it, and with the curator's own description travelling beside the image rather than behind a login.
Universities and research
Special collections that only earn their keep when researchers can actually reach into them.
Special collections earn their keep only when a researcher reaches into them without an appointment. The obstacles are practical: the finding aid is a PDF, the digitised runs are on a shared drive, and a question that spans two collections cannot be asked at all. What a research library needs is a catalogue that answers questions in the language of the person asking, keeps a shortlist between sessions, releases a file in a form that can be cited, and — for a thesis under review — has its copied passages checked against the collection, available when enabled for an installation.
- Ask a question — when licensed
- Copied passages, found and compared — plagiarism detection
- Downloads in a citable form
Publishers and newspaper archives
A century of print that is only worth digitising if a journalist can find one paragraph in it.
A newspaper archive is the most searched and least searchable thing a publisher owns. A century of print carries the reporting, the photographs and the advertising that no one else has — and none of it is worth anything to a journalist on deadline unless one paragraph, on one page, in one edition, can be found in seconds. That means text recognised from difficult print, pages broken into the articles they actually contain, and a download that respects the rights attached to each item.
Broadcasters and moving image
Hours of footage where the thing you need is thirty seconds long.
In an audiovisual archive the unit of value is not the tape, it is the thirty seconds inside it. Cataloguing at programme level means a researcher watches an hour to find a sentence. What changes the economics is speech transcribed with timings and faces gathered across the whole archive, so a search lands on the moment rather than the file — and a producer can clear and cut from it the same afternoon.
Government and private collections
Records that must stay on your own infrastructure, and sometimes off the network entirely.
Records offices and private collections often start from the opposite constraint: nothing may leave. The requirement is not a feature but a posture — the platform runs on the institution's own servers, can run with no route to the outside network at all, and every action against a record is attributable. Access is decided collection by collection, and the answer to "where is our data" is a rack the institution owns.
See it on your own material.
A guided demonstration on our demo server, with a few items from your collection if you wish.