Making history with HP

Bletchley Park project may expand as time progresses, Fleur Doidge finds

Seymour: Confident of plenty of possibilities from Bletchley Park project

The channel may in future get more opportunities to work alongside HP as its Bletchley Park World War II data archiving and digitisation partnership develops, according to the vendor.

HP announced this month that it is collaborating with one-time World War II counter-intelligence centre Bletchley Park in a 3-5 year project to digitise about a million documents from its vast paper based archive, including historic communiques, memos, photos, and other material.

Laura Seymour, marketing manager for LaserJet and enterprise solutions at HP’s Imaging and Printing Group (IPG), says it will be discussing possible initiatives with which resellers could get involved both within HP and with the Bletchley Park Trust.

“As this is a long term partnership between HP and Bletchley Park, and not only a donation of our technology, I’m confident that there will be plenty of possibilities for our channel partners to benefit from this fascinating endeavour as the project progresses,” she says.

The deal aims to help the Bletchley Park Trust, which runs Bletchley Park’s National Codes Centre and its museum and educational facilities, preserve and make public various unique and valuable records of the 1939-1945 war. HP is donating and deploying document management and scanning kit, including A3 and A4 Scanjets, specialised flat-bed scanners for scanning fragile material, integrated Kofax Virtual Rescan technology, and double feed detection.

A ProLiant ML330 server will power the massive archive. Document management software provided by HP and scanning services partner Digital Workplace will be used to catalogue and handle the data, tagging it and tracking it using specified search/location criteria, keywords and phrases. The aim is to make information easy to find and explore, either on-site or remotely.

Simon Greenish, trust director at Bletchley Park, says ongoing technical support is also part of the deal, with the initial digitisation phase expected to take at least a year.

“This will help preserve and considerably increase access to the historic fragile materials, as well as enable researchers to see and study documents from the code-breaking work that took place during World War II,” Greenish says.

“There can be few archives which contain material that had such a profound impact on the world at the time, and which is still relevant today. The project represents a considerable technical challenge and without the help from HP and the top-end technology now in place, this project would not be happening.”

Bletchley Park played host to covert operations teams of mathematicians – including Alan Turing – and military operatives during the war, most famously for project Ultra, which helped crack the supposedly unbreakable German Enigma code, among other things, helping the Allies hasten the end of the war.

HP’s Seymour says IPG handled the deal for the publicly funded Park directly. “We discovered that the Park was in need of such support for its archive through discussions with an analyst and it became clear that HP would be able to deliver on the technology, bringing the project five years forward,” she says.

Gunning for the document archiving space>> www.channelweb.co.uk/2261503