Televisual: Mirror Group Newspapers

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Mirror Group Newspapers

When Mirror Group Newspapers planned in 1994 to move to new offices in Canary Wharf from their aging premises in Holborn, the library faced a problem. The amount of space available in the new premises was less than half their existing size. This meant a spring clean on a massive scale.
As an early adopter of electronic text archiving, Mirror Group Newspapers already handled all its daily text electronically. It’s historic clippings library was substantially replicated on microfilm, but there was an eight year period which was only available as paper. This amounted to two million clippings, which occupied some 2000 square feet. As this was half of the total space available for the new library, the library manager decided the best course of action was to have the two million clippings scanned and added as page images to the text archive. The 200 CD’s which this would require would be housed in two jukeboxes with a total footprint equivalent to two filing cabinets. (Even this would not eat into his floor space, as they would be located in the systems room.) At a cost similar to microfilm, the clippings would be available online to all editorial staff. Mirror Group Newspapers contracted with Televisual to scan the clippings.

Televisual provided a turnkey service. The first issues that a clippings scanning project of this size raises when the customer is a newspaper is that they need round the clock access to the material when it is being scanned, as breaking news will determine what information journalist require for research. Televisual staffed from 7.00 to 24.00 six days a week, and from 9.00 to 13.00 on Sundays. At all other times staff were on call with a bleeper to answer any enquiries.

Library staff in Mirror Group Newspapers packed the clippings into bankers boxes, and Televisual collected half in one shipment to its scanning centre, located at that time in Dunoon, Scotland. On receipt, boxes were logged in to a tracking database, and allocated a unique number. Televisual staff then entered the folder subjects into this database, again allocating unique numbers to each folder. The folders were then scanned on specialist document scanners to TIFF Group images. The scanning operation involves a lot of manual effort, and is unlike the sheet fed scanning operations typical with office documents. Each clipping needs to be manually placed on the scanner, and unfolded if necessary. For some folders, clippings needed to be sorted into date order before scanning. Every scan was then checked for visual quality, rescanned if required, and in some cases marked to identify that the scan was the best possible from a poor quality original.

If the Mirror Group editorial staff needed a clipping or information from it, they telephoned a “hot line” in Televisual, where the staff would use the database to identify the box and folder required, and then either answer the query, or fax back the clippings.

The remaining clippings were collected in two batches, with the scanned material dispatched to low cost off site storage. (The original material was kept for legal reasons, as at this time only the original was acceptable as evidence in a court case.)

The two million clippings took approximately six months to scan.

Last Updated: Monday 29 May 2006 - 11:21

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