Media multinational Naspers digitises its vast archives with the help of First Coast

As a massive multinational media company, Naspers has an enormous amount of historical paper-based information. These include photographs, illustrations, articles, back issues of publications, documentation, and many more assets.

Creating a digital archive of these materials meant:

• A vast range of resources could become easily accessible by Naspers staff or external users, regardless of their location;
• Productivity would increase as users would be able to access content at the click of a mouse - no more two-week waits while material was dug out of a basement;
• Electronic searches by keywords, dates and other tags would make finding relevant information extremely easy;
• New revenue streams could be explored, for example, selling and licensing the use of photographs, or people being able to order a copy of the newspaper from the day they were born; and
• Storage space would be reduced significantly as many of the paper copies would no longer be required.

FirstCoast Technologies worked with Naspers to identify their requirements and then advised the best solution to meet these goals efficiently.

The project consisted of:

• Scanning large volumes of documents;
• Creating an archive repository for huge volumes of digital information;
• Developing a platform to search, research, add and distribute digital information from the archive; and
• Storing the paper assets on completion of the project.

Capturing the materials electronically

Naspers' documents varied in terms of quality, size, age, and bound and unbound content. A job like this required specific machines that could obtain fast, good-quality results - without causing damage to the originals.

FirstCoast Technologies used the following products to achieve results that would transform the way Naspers stored and accessed archived information:

• Unbound documentation:  Scamax M06 scanners are ideal if material is unbound, as they scan 150 pages and output 300 images per minute. With good document preparation and handling, the scanning process is extremely efficient.
• Bound documentation:  A Zeutschel OS 12000 colour book scanner was used for all the books and other bound documents.

Because Naspers wanted the scanned documents to be searchable, all materials were scanned in colour at an optimal resolution for optimal preservation and an optical character recognition (OCR) process was applied. They were then indexed according to the Naspers archive standard.

Creating a digital archive

Using OpenText Alchemy, FirstCoast created a repository to manage and store all of scanned documents. Naspers had an existing archive indexing system, which was applied and a relational database was created to manage additional meta data for the newly-archived information. Because all the scanned materials were processed through an OCR engine, it is possible to search them all by text and phrases.

The archive manager can manage access to the archive, edit documents and add content extremely easily and quickly. The archive manager also controls who has access to the content, and all or part of the materials can be restricted. Users can access the content in various ways - a user-friendly and easily-searchable web interface was set up for general access within the company.

A dynamic, growing resource

Now the digital archive is evolving and growing daily. Content is added to it, material is distributed and searches are conducted in it every day, from many sources. Gone are the days where Naspers staff had to wait two weeks while material was dug up from a basement - today this information is accessibly to the whole organisation - and external clients - at the click of a mouse.

Technical information:

The products that FirstCoast used to create Naspers' digital archive were:

• OpenText Alchemy: For creating a digital archive and searchable materials.
• Inotec Scamax M06 150 page scanners: For scanning unbound documentation.
• Zeutschel OS 12000 C book scanner: For scanning bound documents.

More information

For more information or to find out how FirstCoast can help your company digitise and archive your materials, please contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it on +27 (0) 861 313 300.

Contact First Coast Technologies to see what we could do for you.