The National Library Of Scotland Is Digitizing Thousands Of Assets Each Week And Storing Them On Scality Ring To Preserve Precious Collections And Make Them Broadly Accessible
One of Scotland’s national cultural collections
September 24, 2019 – San Francisco, CA – Scality leader in software solutions for global data orchestration and distributed file and object storage, today shared that the National Library of Scotland is employing Scality RING object storage software to preserve and protect historic and current collections cost effectively and efficiently.
One of Scotland’s national cultural collections, the National Library of Scotland’s growing repository currently occupies 120 miles of shelving, with thousands of new items being added every single week. The library’s digitization initiative makes the collections more accessible to the public, while preserving the important assets.
Accommodating the increasing volumes of digitized data and eliminating labor-intensive tape were two key requirements for the team at National Library of Scotland. “Modernizing and streamlining as we move into this period of mass digital growth moved us to simplified object storage, standardized on S3,” said Stuart Lewis, National Library of Scotland’s Associate Director.
The team chose Scality RING as the foundation of the Library’s preservation storage with one copy in each of two on-premises RINGs in their Edinburgh and Glasgow data centers and a third copy in AWS Glacier Deep Archive.
Ease of management and the ability to scale easily and limitlessly as they add thousands of items each week, coupled with software licensing that doesn’t penalize them for choosing replication as their resiliency model because Scality licenses software on a “data protected” model, not total data stored, won them over. Offering modern, resilient S3-compatible storage, Scality made the choice even easier by providing a bitrot checker for digital preservation monitoring that streamlines the data integrity checking process.
Things are going so well for them that the National Library of Scotland is looking at additional use cases. “Scality met all of our requirements and more,” added Lewis. “We’re looking at moving other backups, replacing tape with disk-to-disk backup; moving the non-print collections and even offering it as a service to other organizations, given its multi-tenancy capabilities.”
About The National Library of Scotland
The National Library is a major European research library and one of the world’s leading centres for the study of Scotland and the Scots – an information treasure trove for Scotland’s knowledge, history and culture.
The Library holds more than 31 million physical items dating back over 1000 years in addition to a growing library of e-books, e-journals and other digital material. Every week the Library collects around 3,000 new items. Most of these are received free of charge in terms of Legal Deposit legislation.
www.nls.uk / @natlibscot / facebook
