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LIFE AT THE COALFACE

From STORAGE Magazine Vol 6, Issue 2 - March 2006
 

The Coal Authority maintains and manages mining maps, plans, historic photos and documents in the UK, dating back prior to 1872. In an attempt to preserve and protect this vast collection, the authority has set out upon the task of digitising all these records to protect and preserve them, and provide a digital database for public access. No mean feat, as we report.
 

The Coal Authority was established in Britain by Parliament in 1994 to undertake specific statutory responsibilities associated with the licensing of coal mining operations in Britain. This embraced dealing with subsidence damage claims which are not the responsibility of licensed coalmine operators; with property and historic liability issues, such as the treatment of minewater discharges; and providing public access to information on past and present coal mining operations.

The reason the authority is required to provide public access to information regarding the latter operations goes back to the Coal Mining Act of 1872, which requires coal mine operators to deposit coal mine abandonment plans, when colliery's closed, to HM Inspector of Mines and Quarries.

The authority maintains and manages mining maps, plans, historic photos and documents from the UK, dating back prior to 1872. Not only is this archive of documents a public collection, it is also a national historic record as well. In an attempt to preserve and protect this vast collection, the authority has set upon the task of digitising all these records to protect and preserve them, and provide a digital database for public access.

This vast collection of documents includes more than 100,000 maps and paper records. Most of these maps are larger than three feet square and some are as large as 6' X 9'. For the smaller documents, scans are easily managed with three 60-inch roller scanners, each controlled by a single PC. In order to accommodate the extremely large maps, the authority worked with DigiData, a development by Bournemouth University, to devise a system to scan sections of the map and stitch the sections together with software in order to build a single image.

DigiData designed a system utilising six very high-resolution scan-back cameras arranged on a gantry over a large glass-covered bed, on which the large-scale maps can be placed. The cameras feed very high-resolution images into six imaging servers, which, in turn, feed each separate image into a single server. Here, custom software then stitches each partial image into a single complete image. When completed, it is fed into the database as a single digital image of the original map. Special care is taken to ensure that the scale and stitching is accurate and seamless, and all handwritten annotations are legible.

After two and a half years, the authority is about two-thirds of the way to completion with the collection of smaller maps and is beginning to scan the larger maps. The large maps create a digital image typically between nine and 12 gigabytes, and currently the system is managing about 70 terabytes of data. Once complete, the database is expected to grow to about 110 terabytes for just the map images.

The database contents are managed with QStar HSM software. QStar provides a cache management system for the imaging software, manages the data from the imaging application on a hard drive cache and then secures it to one of two storage libraries on site. Originally, the authority selected magneto-optical technology to store the data. But at only 9.1 gigabytes per disk, the authority was quick to identify the need for more storage. In its search, it looked at both tape and magnetic disk technology. However, disk required a disaster recovery and backup strategy that proved to be too expensive and tape did not have the longevity or random access required for his application.

A technology was needed that was cost-efficient, randomly accessible and stable over many years. With this in mind, the authority selected UDO (Ultra Density Optical) technology from Plasmon. UDO provided more than three times the capacity of magneto-optical disk and the media platters were less expensive. It was also pleased to discover that these library systems could be retrofitted with the new technology and with a software upgrade. Importantly, QStar could also support the new technology. In this way, there was no requirement to learn new software and the authority was able to keep capital costs down by simply integrating the new drive technology into the existing systems. Currently, the contents of the authority database are stored on a mix of both magneto-optical and UDO platters.

The story does not end here, however. As well as having the digital collection available for public viewing at its offices in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, the authority plans to make the entire collection available online. To do this, it is creating a separate database with lower resolution JPEG format images, also managed in a UDO library controlled by QStar HSM software. In this way, the public will eventually be able to access the mining information from the Internet, thus avoiding the need to travel to the authority's offices.

The authority inventories and manages more than 100,000 mining map image assets, as well as managing a huge volume of photos and mining documents from their historical archives. Protecting and leveraging the value and historical significance of these assets was the focus of this project, with longevity, fast and easy access, and cost the key components in selecting the system. QStar Software and Plasmon's UDO technology are now seen as an integral part of the successful asset management solution.
In a recent interview, David Brown, the authority's network manager with responsibility for developing the storage systems required for the project, commented: "Because of the size and volume of the images, we could not have made it work without QStar's software. They were the only solution that could handle the requirements we had." ST