Newspaper Licensing Authority picks Lemur and Flax

Operating on behalf of the UK's national and regional newspapers the Newspaper Licensing Agency licenses organisations to photocopy newspaper articles or to distribute them internally. The company authorises paper and digital copying of press cuttings on behalf of 1400 national, regional and international newspapers in the UK. The NLA currently licenses over 250,000 businesses and organisations ranging from large government organisations, plcs, and limited companies to partnerships and public relations agencies.

The NLA first built a database of newspaper content in PDF and XML text format to better service the licensed copying and distribution of that content.  In order to also serve the needs of journalists in the digital era, the NLA also offers ClipShare, a journalist research tool for the first time.

Clipshare offers direct access to articles from multiple titles in image form. NLA ClipShare allows journalists online access to a searchable database of national and regional newspaper content in text and PDF format. As of March 2008, the NLA had over 10m articles from the UK national and key regional press in its database – occupying 4TB of data.

In order to be effective at any level, users needed to be able to quickly and effectively search all the articles available, or any specific subset, and get meaningful, useful results. The search solution needed to be robust enough to support over a thousand users, each running several searches a week and viewing thousands of PDFs. It also needed to be scalable enough to support several thousand more users and millions more articles.

After shortlisting a handful of options that met the technical requirements, the NLA selected the powerful Flax search solution, open source licensed under the GPL, developed by Lemur Consulting Limited, an award-winning search engine development company.

“We knew that the accuracy and relevance of the search solution chosen would make or break the service, which is why we carried out extensive research into the options available to us,” remarked Michael Pocock, product manager at NLA, who was responsible for the development of the ClipShare service. “Ultimately, we felt that Lemur Consulting satisfied our technical requirements but also represented the best match in terms of the level of support, flexibility and commitment they brought to the project.”

Flax offered the NLA exceptional text search power and cost little to tailor to their requirements, which included offering users the ability to save their searches, automatic alerts on topics of particular interest and a way of restricting access to particular articles under legal embargo. Flax's powerful template-based user interface allowed the NLA to support older browsers and add new features to the user interface very quickly

Flax builds searchable indexes of the millions of documents across all the NLA’s formats, which it then searches in milliseconds. Lemur Consulting then completely customised the user interface to the NLA’s specific requirements, and integrated the solution seamlessly with the NLA’s existing infrastructure.


                                                                                                                                    Charlie Hull MD Lemur Consulting
“Based on open source technology, Flax offers the associated benefits of better quality of search, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in,” said Charlie Hull, MD, Lemur Consulting. “Flax offers a high-performing, secure and stable search infrastructure, backed by expert support and maintenance. With no license fees payable, Flax was a cost-effective solution for the NLA.”

NLA ClipShare was launched in August 2007, with Flax fully integrated at the time.  The service has since been rolled out to provide access to users at many of the London-based national newspapers and trials have been conducted with a dozen Scottish and regional titles with positive feedback.

"I've been using ClipShare for three months. It's superb and completely knocks spots off our existing system. It is fast and reliable, and the key feature is to be able to see the whole page - and save it as a PDF." - Marc Reeves, Editor, Birmingham Post

Feedback from users has shown that ClipShare’s search functionality is significantly faster compared to existing publisher research tools and the simple, intuitive interface has been very well received. Further functionality has been added to ClipShare based on user feedback and the system continues to be actively developed. The search facilities built into Clipshare are also being used by the NLA to develop entirely new markets.

Source:http://www.lemurconsulting.com
Sites: http://www.flax.co.uk/index.shtml
http://blog.nla-clipshare.com/clipshare-blog/
Video Scripting:http://www.clip-share.com/