National Library of Wales Deploys Plasmon Archive Solution

Plasmon announced that the National Library of Wales (NLW), which holds the world’s largest collection of works about Wales and other Celtic nations, has deployed a Plasmon archive solution to preserve records of literary, historic and artistic significance and facilitate their availability to the public. The Plasmon enterprise archive solution provides robust long-term digital storage that minimises ongoing hardware expense, administrative overhead and operating costs.

As one of the leading cultural archives in the world, the NLW mission is to preserve Welsh records indefinitely and facilitate their availability for the public. NLW has worked on a series of projects to electronically capture key collections. Scanning as many as 2,000 documents a day, NLW’s digital archive is currently growing at a rate of 2-3TB (terabytes) each year, a growth rate that looks set to accelerate in the future. Once documents have been scanned, they are archived on the Plasmon solution and made available electronically within the library and online through NLW’s website.

Steve Tongish, marketing director EMEA at Plasmon, commented, “Plasmon’s archive solution is a key component in the digital preservation strategy of NLW. Our corporate goal is to help customers achieve data longevity and rapid recall. This is directly in line with NLW’s requirements. In addition, the cost-effective operation and low energy consumption helps them to control long-term expenditures and meet environmental targets defined by the Welsh government.”

NLW recognises the need to migrate records periodically to newer storage technology in order to maintain a cost-effective and accessible archive. Einion Gruffudd, senior systems analyst at NLW, commented, "Our UDO archive provides real benefits for the management of IT and the delivery of services. The Plasmon archive platform provides NLW with extended retention periods that can not be matched by other storage technologies and users appreciate the performance benefit of accessing records from the Plasmon archive since it is much faster and more reliable than tape."

With a current archive capacity of nearly 20TB, NLW is planning to upgrade from Plasmon’s first to second generation UDO2, effectively doubling the potential capacity of its system. The non-disruptive expansion and upgrade process, alongside extended retention periods, protects the technical and financial investment NLW has made in its archive solution platform.

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