Case Study: Public Record Office of Northern Ireland preserves and makes 20,000 historical pages searchable with Aetopia

PRONI preserves 20,000 pages with Aetopia

The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) needed to protect 20,000 pages of fragile 19th-century Belfast Street Directories from physical damage. Their challenge included poor quality OCR that limited searchability, a complex public interface, and an infrastructure unable to handle public demand. They partnered with Aetopia to implement its DAM & Digital Collections solution to address these issues.

Aetopia reprocessed the entire collection with advanced cloud OCR to create fully searchable documents with precise term highlighting. They built an intuitive public search interface and deployed the system on secure, scalable AWS infrastructure. As a result, Aetopia helped PRONI preserve 30 historical directories, making 81 years of Northern Irish history freely accessible to researchers worldwide while protecting the original fragile documents.

Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (proni)