Case Study: National Library of Scotland achieves scalable, resilient digital preservation with Scality RING

National Library of Scotland entrusts cultural treasures to Scality RING

The National Library of Scotland, custodian of more than 31 million items and aiming to have one-third of its collections digitized by 2025, faced rapid growth (about 5,000 new items weekly) and fragile, labor‑intensive preservation workflows based on SAN/tape. To achieve scalable, resilient object storage with an S3 interface and replace tape-based backups, the library partnered with Scality and selected Scality RING.

Scality deployed Scality RING with S3, cross‑region replication (Edinburgh and Glasgow RINGs plus a third copy in AWS Glacier Deep Archive) and integrated it with the library’s asset management system. The solution eliminated tape, added automated integrity checking (a Bitrot checker), enabled linear scale‑out on commodity servers, and kept data available through a data‑center outage. As a result, the library digitized over 200,000 items in a year, reduced maintenance and TCO (licensing based on original data rather than replicated copies), and gained confidence to consolidate additional workloads.

National Library of Scotland

Stuart Lewis

Associate Director