Press Release
IRISH TIMES CHOOSES OLIVE SOFTWARE TO DIGITIZE NEWSPAPER'S ARCHIVE
SANTA CLARA, California, November 27, 2006 - The Irish Times has
selected Olive Software to digitize one hundred and fifty years of what
is widely considered the newspaper of record and reference for the island
of Ireland. The Irish Times, the Library Council of Ireland, and the Department
of the Environment, in association with Olive Software, is undertaking
this sizable archiving project in order to unlock the newspaper’s
content to its users and make it fully searchable and available online.
“The archive will provide invaluable insights into the Ireland of
the past and its evolution to the nation it is today, by allowing people
to delve into the history of Ireland and the world by reference to the
perspectives of the times and the contemporary historical context in which
the news was written,” Niall O’Connor, from The Irish Times
New Media Division, commented. “The strength of a newspaper archive
lies in the fact that newspaper articles, whatever their shortcomings
of narrative or interpretation at the time, remain unchanged and do not
suffer from revision of their content and blurring with the passage of
time. Newspaper archives represent the essential source material for social
scientists and historians seeking to build an accurate appreciation of
the time in history in which they were written.”
“The Irish Times project provides a great example of a world-class
newspaper expanding its commitment to its readers into the digital era,”
stated Yuval Rachmilevitz, CEO of Olive Software. “By making the
entire archive collection available in a digital format, the paper will
make hundred and fifty years of unbroken history come alive.”
Olive shares the vision of long-term preservation and the need to avoid
software and hardware obsolescence by providing its clients’ future-proof
XML solutions. In response to the constantly growing demand among readers
and scholars worldwide for online access to offline materials like books,
periodicals and historic newspapers, Olive is delivering technology to
meet the demands of global communities and to continue fostering research
and educational pursuits.
The Irish Times joins a long list of US and international publications
that use Olive solutions to make their content available in a digital
format, including The Financial Times, Handelsbladet, The Oklahoman, Denver
Newspaper Agency and Yediot Aharonot.
About Ireland.com:
In 1994 The Irish Times was the first newspaper in Britain and Ireland,
and among the first 30 in the world to publish on the World Wide Web.
It appeared as a series of simple text pages until graphics and pictures
were introduced in 1996.
Over the following years, the range of services and content accessible
through the site continued to grow, and in March 1999 the site was re-launched
as ireland.com. The new URL and brand houses The Irish Times print edition
and ancillary sites focusing on the traditional franchise areas of the
newspaper.
It continues to provide a range of Internet-based products aimed at those
interested in Ireland and all things Irish. ireland.com remains Ireland's
leading news and information website, recording more than 850,000 visitors
and 13 million page impressions in March 2005.
The site has won many awards, including Golden Spiders in Ireland, IP
TOP awards in Zurich and Eppy awards in the United States. It continues
to innovate and has increasingly employed multimedia to enhance its coverage.
About Olive Software:
Olive Software enables its customers to transform their content resources into intelligent knowledge assets, enabling information discovery, effective search and future-proof preservation. Hundreds of companies and millions of end-users rely on Olive to unlock the information in their content and publish it through a browser, customized web application or portal, or knowledge management application. Olive’s end-to-end electronic publishing platform understands the structure and semantics of electronic, paper, microfilm, and microfiche documents and automatically converts them to XML with highly searchable metadata.
Olive Software is based in Santa Clara, California, with sales offices
in New York, Washington DC, Denver, and Los Angeles, and R&D facilities
in Israel. For more information about Olive Software, please visit our
web site at www.olivesoftware.com.
Media Contacts:
Olive Software, Inc.
Sasha Frey
Marketing Director
Email: sashaf@olivesoftware.com
www.olivesoftware.com
The Irish Times
Niall O'Connor
The Irish Times New Media Division
Email: noconnor@irish-times.com
www.ireland.com