iDoc – Digital Archive
This application was developed specifically for Mediacentar Sarajevo, an educational centre supporting the development of independent professional journalism in Bosnia & Herzegovina (BiH). Over time, it grew to encompass other activities including publishing, media research, PR training & consulting, TV & Radio production. It also organizes cultural events.
Mediacentar’s digital archive project initially started with a searchable database of print articles published in the daily and weekly newspapers of Bosnia & Herzegovina (BiH). This database was created in-house using MS Access. The objective of this database was to simplify the search process for journalists researching on BiH, and to significantly cut the time spent in carrying out this research.
As the database grew, Mediacentar quickly realised the need for an online user-oriented digital archive. Alcassoft tendered for and won the contract to build them this system.
The online digital archive (iDoc) built by Alcassoft is an archive of print media and other relevant content, stored on the Internet and made available via subscription to: journalists, media houses, public relations practitioners, academics, students and researchers. Its application is in media analysis and monitoring, public events monitoring, monitoring of theme-based media reporting, as well as research on key personalities, e.g. public events attended and interviews, statements and comments given.
iDoc offers a rich and diverse source of information, and an ideal basis for any serious academic or journalistic research project dealing with Bosnia and Herzegovina and the region of Southeast Europe. iDoc is regularly used by the journalists of most BiH media, students, post-graduates, foreign journalists, and even the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), located at The Hague.
Information that would normally take much time and effort in acquiring is, through iDoc, made available at a keyword search in a matter of seconds.
Currently, between 200 and 300 articles from daily, weekly and monthly editions printed in and around BiH are entered into iDoc on a daily basis. It already stores over 150,000 articles, which are available for download. This number is still growing.
Features include:
- Management of digital documents – supports the upload and full-text indexing of common document formats including PDF, DOC, XSL, TXT & CVS
- Management of online subscribers – Articles on iDoc are available via subscription only. Users are able to subscribe to the service online. Subscribers are either individuals or organisations. iDoc supports the management of these subscribers, including the calculation of available credits, recognising authorised users for corporate subscribers, keeping track of the validity of the subscriptions, etc.
- Reports – Comprehensive reports are available, customizable by date. These range from “big picture” business summary reports to the nitty-gritties of earnings per publication, royalties owed, most-viewed articles, most searched keywords, etc.
- Advanced searching capability – All articles uploaded are full-text indexed, meaning that when a search string is entered (e.g. war crimes), it is compared against every word in the article, not just against an abstract or keywords associated with that article. This is similar to the searches performed by Web search engines like Google and Yahoo.
- Automated Importer – a recent enhancement which scans and parses PDF versions of print publications sent by publishers, to automatically extract articles in the format used within iDoc. This is a fully automated process which eliminates the need for tedious manual data entry.
