The National Library of Scotland is the legal deposit library of Scotland and is one of the country’s National Collections. The Library stores over 7 million books, 14 million printed items and over 2 million maps. The collection includes copies of the Gutenberg Bible, the letter which Charles Darwin submitted with the manuscript of Origin of Species, the First Folio of Shakespeare and numerous journals and other publications. It has the largest collection of Scottish Gaelic material of any library.

Solution Components

Software Defined Storage

• Scality RING with S3 Object Storage Interface
• Cross-Region Replication 2 RINGS: Edinburgh and Glasgow data centres and a third copy in AWS Glacier Deep Archive

Hardware

• 6 HPE Apollo 4510 Servers per site

Third Party Applications

• In-house developed asset management system, upgraded to work natively with S3

“Working with Scality has been brilliant.”

Stuart Lewis
Associate Director, National Library of Scotland

The library has a set a goal for one third of the collections to be in digital format by 2025.

The National Library of Scotland houses one of Scotland’s national cultural collections, and as a Legal Deposit Library it is entitled to claim a copy of everything published in the UK. The growing collections occupy 120 miles of shelving, with thousands of new items being added every single week. The library has a set a goal for one third of the collections to be in digital format by 2025. With that much data to hold, protect, and make accessible they needed a new approach. They found a partner in Scality.

The Challenge

A collection that broad and vast requires a lot of care. In 2015 the National Library of Scotland published an ambitious strategy, including the aim to have a third of the collections in digital format by 2025. Last year the Library digitized over 200,000 items, most of which are available for free public consumption on the website. In order to preserve this information for future generation, the Library needed a secure cloud archiving system.

The Solution

National Library of Scotland made the move to Scality RING after getting proposals from “all of the expected vendors.” They chose Scality RING as a foundation to their preservation storage strategy. In addition to providing the resilient S3-compatible storage they wanted, Scality further advanced the Library’s data integrity assurance model.

Primary Benefits Scality Delivers for the National Library of Scotland