The National Library of Wales has a huge wealth of invaluable content and guards the national heritage. Its media collection comprises 7.000.000 feet of film, 250.000 hours of video, 950.000 photographs plus millions of audio & music recordings, books, newspapers, manuscripts, maps, works of art, etc.

This content shall be available to the public anywhere and everywhere.

NLW needed a dedicated service for publishing audio-visual materials. They require highly featured, multiple-languages yet easy to use public websites to slot-into the existing NLW site-framework. They needed to handle complex rights-constellations, fully meet accessibility criteria (WASG 2.1 AAA), be easily managed. Its publication workflows needed to be highly automated and use both locally hosted content and CDN publishing.

Solution

Combining Flow Center, Flow Archive and Flow Playout modules, NLW, x-dream-distribution and Flow Works built a multi-tiered system to ingest, edit, manage, archive and selectively publish a wide range of content.

Video, audio, photos, and documents from multiple sources (BBC, ITV, Channel4 and many others) are mass-delivered to the NLW, automatically ingested and quality-controlled, metadata automatically extracted and verified, editorial staff notified for further editing, completion and approvals. These complex and high-volume ingest / acquisition workflows are naturally complemented by Flow Center’s auto-executing processing engines, leaving staff to focus on adding editorial value.

Once fully acquired and verified, NLW has a strong mandate to publish/make-available Welsh national heritage to a wide audience. The Flow Publish module integrates with numerous publishing platforms, including web, social media, and physical locations, enabling the library to reach a wide audience with targeted offers and content.

Target groups such as the general public, journalists, volunteers or researchers will be addressed with specific offers in content and functions. Flow Works is implementing these services as fully integrated publishing, using the Flow Publish range of products. Directly driven by editorial decisions in the Flow Archive, publication onto any/all websites is seamless, immediate and transparent. No CMS needed, no agencies needed, no data-duplication, fully automated processing (incl. CDN) = economical and fully steerable.

As a further highlight, the National Library's four main locations are fully integrated into one system with a decentralized network architecture. The unique abilities of flow2flow (attach and integrate multiple locations in one system) and Flow Edge Computing (auto-process where the resources are best available) will give NLW a unique and highly innovative architecture, safe and secure access/distribution to sensitive content at the highest speeds as well as optimal use of infrastructure across all locations – all automated.

Success