Case study: Matthew Thorpe, Coal Authority

The UK coal industry might seem an unlikely place to find innovation, but the Coal Authority is at the forefront of digital media technology and content management.

The Authority is responsible for keeping maps and records detailing every mine shaft in the UK, including details of if and when it was abandoned. This data is then made available to house builders, local authorities and, since the introduction of the Freedom of Information Act, the general public.

Traditionally, the maps were kept in a physical library. ‘It’s a system that has worked for the last 200 years, but it was time for a change,’ says Matthew Thorpe, the Coal Authority’s information systems and security manager. ‘Particularly when you’re giving people maps that might be nine feet by six feet, and several hundred years old.’

In 2005, the Coal Authority embarked on a project to digitise all of its archive, some 100,000 maps and paper records, so visitors could view maps on PCs at the Authority’s offices. Putting the maps online was not an option because of the volume of data involved; the maps alone stack up to more than 100Tb. Initially it seemed impossible – there was not a scanner on the market that was able to cope with the large, fragile maps.

So, Thorpe and his team worked for several months with experts from Bournemouth University to develop a camera that could scan the huge documents. Each map can now be scanned and stored digitally as a Tif file.

The camera uses six very high-resolution cameras over a single glass base to scan sections of the map and then stitch together the files to create a single image. The resulting images are stored on ultra-density optical media and managed using software from Plasmon.

The Authority is now two-thirds of the way through the project, and is already looking at its next initiative – rolling out software to archive email, which can be linked into map data.

‘We are always looking at the next step – which in this case is finding a way to make the collection available online,’ says Thorpe.

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