The new generation of MediaINFO Digital Library
Search beyond the language of the archive.
Ask the archive a question. Get evidence, not guesses.
How was the United Arab Emirates founded? — English → Arabic · French · English
The archive answers a question. The query “How was the United Arab Emirates founded?” is typed in English and reaches material in Arabic, French and English. Three pages light up: front page (Arabic) · 3 December 1971; une (French) · 3 décembre 1971; front page (English) · 3 December 1971. The photograph — The declaration of the establishment of the state read at Union House, Dubai — is checked for faces: Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan · from the person record; Sir Geoffrey Arthur · from the person record; face · not yet named; 10 more faces are boxed and left unnamed. The record — Letter of the President to the United Nations · 2 December 1971 · from the official record — is read line by line: “the Rulers of the above-mentioned six Emirates have promulgated the Constitution of the United Arab Emirates and proclaimed it as an independent and sovereign State on 2 December 1971”, and “sovereign State” is found. Lines connect the question to the evidence and to the answer: 2 December 1971 — Six emirates proclaim the United Arab Emirates at Union House, Dubai. Ras Al Khaimah joins on 10 February 1972. From the newspaper reports, the photographs' records and the declaration.
The stance
AI can interpret the archive. The archive remains the authority.
- The original object stays intact — originals are kept, and images are stored losslessly.
- Intelligence is a layer on top: text, faces, transcripts, translations and descriptions sit beside the object, never inside it.
- What AI derived is marked as derived, so a researcher always knows which is which.
Discovery
Discovery in four moves.
Four things a reader can do on the first afternoon, on material the institution already holds.
On the stage: the question «من رئيس الاتحاد؟» is typed and translated — “Who is the president of the union?” — over the newspaper, where the passage «زايد رئيس للإتحاد» is Arabic, transcribed and translated: Zayed, president of the union.
On the stage: the photograph · 2 December 1971 with 3 faces found — Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan · from the person record; Sir Geoffrey Arthur · from the person record; face · not yet named.
On the stage: the waveform of the recording of 12 March 1933 — Fireside Chat 1, on the banking crisis — radio address from the White House, Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of the United States — the words “for all legitimate purposes, the phantom of fear will soon be laid.” landing in time, and “legitimate” found at 8:45.
On the stage: the answer — 2 December 1971 — Six emirates proclaim the United Arab Emirates at Union House, Dubai. Ras Al Khaimah joins on 10 February 1972. From the newspaper reports, the photographs' records and the declaration. — with its three citations: front page (Arabic) · 3 December 1971; une (French) · 3 décembre 1971; front page (English) · 3 December 1971.
Display
The whole collection, on one canvas.
An item's pages — or a collection's photographs — sit on one continuous canvas. The viewer draws the tiles it needs at the depth you are looking, so moving between them is a pan, not a load.
- Magazine 40 · 127 frames
- AS11-40-5903
- Buzz Aldrin · person record
- Neil Armstrong, reflected
1,406 photographs of one mission, every one public domain; the tiles you see loading are the same tiles the product serves.
The canvas is worked with the keyboard once it is held: the arrow keys move across it, plus and minus zoom, Home returns to the whole mission, and Escape — or the Release control — lets the page go on.
The 1,406 photographs of the Apollo 11 mission, July 1969, laid out in film-magazine order on one square canvas 38 frames across. The chapter descends from the whole mission into magazine 40 — the 127 frames of the surface walk — then into the frame AS11-40-5903, Buzz Aldrin standing beside the lunar module, and finally into his visor, where Neil Armstrong and the module are reflected. Four further frames are drawn at close range: AS11-40-5875, AS11-40-5878, AS11-40-5886 and AS11-44-6552. Every photograph is a NASA original in the public domain.
The platform underneath
Six things an archive has to do.
Discovery is the visible half. Underneath it sits the foundational platform the institution runs every day.
- OrganizeStructure that mirrors the institution, not the software.Collections and sub-collections that follow your own arrangementDescription in the fields your cataloguers already useBulk import and bulk editing, with every original kept as received
- EnrichUnderstanding added on top of the object — and marked as added.Text recognised from scanned pages and photographs — printed or handwritten, in either reading direction, with every word placed on the pagePages resolved into their articles, each with the order a reader reads it in — in either directionNewspaper name, issue date and issue number read off the page — in Hijri or Gregorian, with the other calendar's date beside itSpeech transcribed with timings, so a result is a momentCaptions, tags and translations kept beside the object, never inside itVideo indexed by what changes on screen, with chapters from the transcript when licensedFaces detected and matched to person records; public-people packs, available in certain countries and regions, provide automatic name labelling, with aliases, of thousands of public figures.
- DisplayOne viewer for every kind of material in the collection.Deep zoom on high-resolution images and scanned pagesVideo, audio, documents and 3D objects on the same surfaceTwo objects side by side, panning and zooming together
- InteractMaterial you can work with, not only look at.Regions drawn and annotated directly on a page or photographDuplicates found inside any search — the same file twice, a rescan, a crop, a copied passage — and compared side by sideFilters, saved searches and personal shortlistsKeyboard-first navigation for people who are in the archive all day
- ReuseThe material leaves in the form the work needs.Download presets your administrators define — original, web copy or PDFResolution limits and watermarks applied per presetAn editor for assembling, reordering and re-describing items
- SharePublishing outward on the standards the sector already uses.Harvesting over OAI-PMH, in Dublin Core and Europeana metadataStandard image delivery, so partners render your images in their viewersStructured data on public pages, so catalogues are read correctly
Built for institutions
Different collections. Different first problems.
The platform is one system; what matters most differs by the kind of institution running it.
National libraries and archives
Millions of pages, many of them in scripts and languages the reading room no longer speaks.
Museums and heritage
Objects, photographs and documents that have to be shown as carefully as they are kept.
Universities and research
Special collections that only earn their keep when researchers can actually reach into them.
Publishers and newspaper archives
A century of print that is only worth digitising if a journalist can find one paragraph in it.
Broadcasters and moving image
Hours of footage where the thing you need is thirty seconds long.
Government and private collections
Records that must stay on your own infrastructure, and sometimes off the network entirely.
Deployment
Runs where your archive lives.
On your own infrastructure, on your own terms — including with no way out to the network at all.
Runs on your infrastructure
The platform is installed on your own servers, in your own data centre or private cloud. Your material, your metadata and your users stay inside your perimeter.
- A guided installation onto hardware you control
- Roles, permissions and audit under your administrators
- Standards out: harvesting over OAI-PMH in Dublin Core and Europeana metadata, standard image delivery, structured data on public pages
Air-gapped when it must be
An installation can be run with no outbound connection at all. The resident agent then never contacts the vendor; releases arrive as signed offline bundles.
- No outbound check-in, by configuration
- Upgrades delivered as offline bundles you carry in
- AI processing can be confined to a segment with no route out, which your own network monitoring can verify
Upgrades in place, rolls back on its own
Updates are offered, never applied unattended: a release is applied when an administrator asks for it, health-checked, and reverted automatically if it does not prove itself.
- Every stage journalled, from snapshot to commit
- A rollback restores the containers and the configuration
- It does not restore your data — the database, the repository storage and the search index are never reverted by an upgrade, so take your own backup first
References
Some of the institutions we are proud to serve — across Europe, the Gulf, Africa and beyond.
See it on your own material.
A guided demonstration on our demo server, with a few items from your collection if you wish.