Case Study: Royal Society of Chemistry achieves access to 170 years of chemistry data with MarkLogic

UK Chemistry Society Unlocks 170 Years’ Worth of Data with the Power and Flexibility of MarkLogic

The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), a 150+ year‑old professional body and publisher, faced the challenge of aggregating and exposing 170 years of heterogeneous content—millions of images, articles and data files from 200,000+ authors stored in many formats and locations. The society needed an integrated, online repository capable of handling unstructured, schema‑varying content so teachers, researchers and businesses could easily find and use its material.

RSC chose MarkLogic’s enterprise NoSQL document database to load content as‑is, automatically tag and associate diverse assets, and power its publishing and education sites. The platform enabled faster search and delivery, supported The Merck Index digitization, and drove measurable gains: publishing 20,000+ articles in 2011, publishing capacity of 3x more journals and 4x more articles since 2006, a 30% rise in article views, a 70% boost in educational site traffic, and increased research engagement in India, China and Brazil, plus new journals, mobile apps and social initiatives.

Royal Society of Chemistry

David Leeming

Strategic Innovatin Group Solution Manager