DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT:

Historic Bletchley Park WW2 spy files to be digitized with HP's help

Counter-intelligence documents to be made available on-line

HP (Hewlett Packard) has generously donated digitisation equipment and software with support to the Bletchley Park Trust, an organisation dedicated to preserving the site of the UK’s main counter-intelligence decryption activities during WW2.

With HP's assistance the Bletchley Park Trust aims to capture its vast archive of historical counter-intelligence and decryption documents and make these accessible to the public in digital format. While Scanners4CAD's brief is large format scanning and does not normally cover document management capture, the importance of Bletchley Park as a WW2 counter-intelligence operation and also as a birthplace of modern computing cannot be ignored.

Necessity is the mother of invention
- and war is its father.

Before WW2 Bletchley Park was a run-down but once splendid Victorian house facing demolition by property developers. In 1938 it was saved by the government who recognised that in the event of a war breaking out in Europe a large, secure building would be needed for counter-intelligence purposes.

WW2 duly made Bletchley Park the centre of a decoding operation aimed at decrypting the German Enigma cipher machine, an electro-mechanical rotor device used for encrypting and decrypting secret messages. The Germans proudly believed it was unbreakable. Primitive computers were built at Bletchley Park to advance the code-breaking process. It is claimed that the breaking of the Enigma code shortened WW2 by up to two years.

There were other computing developments which preceded or ran in parallel with those in Britain. What set Bletchley Park apart was that it was the world's first successful attempt to use a computer on an industrial scale. Up to 10,000 people worked there providing support and services to the code-breakers. While most other computer developments at that time were largely theoretical, Bletchley Park's "Bombe" and Colossys computers had a real practical application - breaking code and winning the war!

That this historical archive exists at all is hugely lucky. At the end of WW2, Prime Minister Churchill ordered Bletchley Park's secrets to be destroyed. As a result of this decree, the epoch-defining Bombe and Colossus computers were smashed up but, fortunately for historians, tons of documents remained. Today they sit in hundreds of boxes and filing trays. It is this archive which Bletchley Park will now place online.

It is entirely appropriate that today Bletchley Park should host Britain's National Museum of Computing. Curiously, but perhaps not wrongly, the Bletchley Park web site's Modern Computing Timeline begins in 1939, the year that WW2 started. Its first reference is to HP, its document management benefactor today.

HP was founded in 1939 by David Packard and Bill Hewlett in a garage in a Palo Alto, California. HP's first product was the HP 200A Audio Oscillator, a piece of test equipment popular with engineers. Walt Disney Pictures used eight of the 200B model as sound effects generators for the 1940 smash hit movie "Fantasia", the first commercial film released with multi-channel sound. Today we take stereophonic sound for granted.

Itself a computer industry pioneer, HP's press release modestly claims that it is simply "partnering with the Bletchley Park Trust". We suspect that it is more than HP simply seeking publicity. HP's donation indicates to us that it has not forgotten its own R&D origins in a California garage, nor the significance of Bletchley Park to a victorious Allied cause and the new computer age which grew out of it.

That this article is written on a PC and that you are presumably reading it on another one is in part directly attributable to what took place at Bletchley Park during the dark days of WW2. Jitze Couperus, a friend of Blethchley Park, says it best on Bletchley Park's web site. It is "very fitting that one of the birthplaces of digital processing is now itself being remembered in digits rather than relying on dead trees."

The following material was supplied by HP.

Digitising the Bletchley Park Archive

HP will also provide ongoing free consultancy and training to aid the digitisation process. The archives include communication transcripts, releases, memoranda, maps, photographs and other material tracing and referencing some of the most significant events of the Second World War.

History-making events

The materials housed at Bletchley Park’s National Code Centre, located in Buckinghamshire, England, document the activities undertaken by the thousands of people who worked at Bletchley Park during the war, intercepting, decrypting and analysing Axis forces’ movements and intentions which were shared using the famous Enigma machine.

The interception of messages flowing across the Axis armies allowed the Allies to determine what the enemy were planning and pre-empt and intercept many of the resulting war tactics of the Axis powers. It also allowed the Allies to seed false information into the Axis war machine and mobilise double-agents to neutralise and frustrate many of the enemy’s campaigns.

Digitising the archive will help preserve its records and give members of the general public—including users outside the United Kingdom—their first ever chance to easily search stories and material on historical events documented in the archive, as well as transform the research process for academics and educators.

Unbreakable Enigma

The Axis powers’ absolute belief that the Enigma code was unbreakable, and the subsequent code-breaking at Bletchley Park, can’t be understated in the role of the Allies winning the war.

The high-level intelligence produced by under-cover mathematicians and military operatives at Bletchley Park during the War—codenamed Ultra—provided crucial assistance to the Allied war effort and is credited with having determined many of the key outcomes of the conflict. This includes activities that decrypted many of Germany’s military communications generated by the Enigma (thought to be unbreakable) and Lorenz machines, and which informed critical Allied counter-espionage strategies and activities designed to counter the German war effort. Their success reduced the length of the war by an estimated two years saving many lives.

The Bletchley Park site is home to, amongst others, the story of the legendary Alan Turing, father of the modern computer; the achievements of multiple spies and spymasters such as Zigzag, Garbo and Bond author Ian Fleming; and some of the technology—represented by the Enigma, Bombe rebuild, and Colossus machines—which heralded the development of the modern computer and the start of the information age.

The Bletchley Park archive, which traces many of the above personalities, currently exists entirely in paper format—most of it difficult to view or handle; and generally inaccessible by the general public for logistical reasons. Only limited access is allowed to the archive by academics and educators under strict supervision.

The digitisation process will involve not only the digital scanning of Bletchley Park’s vast archive but also the cataloguing, management and storage of the material in digital format so that it can be easily accessed and viewed by the public on digital platforms such as the Web.

Expected to take between three and five years, the project involves a wide range of HP document management and imaging technologies, including a range of state-of-the art HP Scanjet scanners and an HP ProLiant ML330 server to scan and store the data. Document management software to handle the cataloguing and virtual management of the data will be provided by HP in partnership with our solutions partner, Digital Workplace.

The process will need to take into account not only the sheer volume of paper-based materials involved, but also the dozens of different formats presented by the documents, including multiple page types, sizes, qualities and material compositions. This will be handled by a variety of specialised document management technologies supplied by HP, including preview technology in scanners to check the quality of individual scans; specialised software that ensures re-scanning of documents on demand; sheet-feed technology used for handling delicate or brittle documents; and a variety of scanning technologies to accommodate different paper formats and requirements.

A summer start

Starting in the summer of 2010, HP will be donating and deploying a state-of-the-art Scanning and Document Management solution that will enable Bletchley Park to commit many hundreds of thousands of the site’s historic documents to digital format. The documents include communication transcripts, communiqués, memoranda, photographs and other material tracing and referencing some of the most significant events of the Second World War.

Saving for the future

Digitising the archive will help preserve its records for future generations and give members of the general public—including users outside the UK—their first ever chance to easily search stories and material on historical events documented in the archive, as well as transform the research process for academics and educators.

Digitising the Archive

The archive at Bletchley Park’s National Code Centre currently exists entirely in paper format—most of it difficult to view or handle; and generally inaccessible by the general public for logistical reasons. Only limited access is allowed to the archive by academics and educators under strict supervision.

The archive comprises many hundreds of thousands of documents which were found in near-derelict condition by a group of volunteers nearly twenty years ago. In the last ten years, the volunteers have dedicated thousands of hours to meticulously filing, indexing and cross-referencing the material in the Park’s archive building.

Web publishing

In partnership with HP, the digitisation process will involve not only the digital scanning of Bletchley Park’s vast archive but also the cataloguing, management and storage of the material in digital format so that it can be easily accessed and viewed by the public on digital platforms such as the Web.

Expected to take between three and five years, the project will involve a wide range of technology that includes HP scanners, multi-function printers, document management software and the IT backbone that will ensure the secure cataloguing and storage of all the information.

The sheer volume of the materials involved and the dozens of different formats the documents exist in, including multiple page types, sizes, qualities and material compositions, makes the digitisation process a huge and unique challenge.

HP technologies

This will be handled by a variety of sophisticated scanning technologies supplied by HP, including a range of HP Scanjets capable of handling A3 and A4 documents which are single or double-sided, sheet-fed technology for high speed volume scanning, specialised flat-bed scanners for scanning very fragile documents such as maps and books, integrated Kofax Virtual Rescan technology that performs a multi-point check on the document as it is scanned and makes automatic adjustments to enhance image quality, and ultrasonic double feed detection ensuring the user is alerted and mis-feeds are not processed.

Following the scanning process, IT infrastructure—including an HP ProLiant ML330 server—will enable the storage of the huge volume of data. Document Management software provided by HP and its solutions partner Digital Workplace will then enable the cataloguing and virtual handling of the data. This latter process will involve tagging the materials to a digital archive according to specified search/location criteria and using in-built tracking and identification technologies that can identify keywords and phrases from across the vast archive of data. All of this will make the information easy to locate and explore.

Public access

Following an initial digitisation phase lasting a year or more, Bletchley Park will make the content available for access using a combination of paid-for and free content. This will make the Bletchley Park archive widely available, and give users around the world a first ever chance to search stories and articles on the unique historical events represented in the Bletchley archive.

HP will support the staff at Bletchley Park who will be directly managing the project on a day-to-day basis, including training them on how to use the equipment and software, and conducting regular reviews of the infrastructure to ensure that the technology is optimised and updated according to usage requirements as they arise.

Preserving the Archive for generations to come

The implications of the digitisation project cannot be underestimated.

The historic documents that reside in Bletchley Park are an invaluable resource for historians, researchers, educators, students and many others, bringing past events and people to life with great immediacy and in rich detail. Making these pages digital and fully searchable will help preserve the materials for generation to come, as well as transform the research process—from one that previously relied on scrolling through page after page of physical or print documents to one that allows for easy, intuitive, dynamic handling of documents on an all-digital platform.

The digitised archive will offer a unique insight into some of the last century’s most defining historical events, including key milestones of World War II that are of great historical interest. HP is honoured to be collaborating on this endeavour with the Bletchley Park Trust.

Following an initial digitisation phase lasting a year or more, Bletchley Park will make the content available for access using a combination of paid-for and free content. This will make the Bletchley Park archive widely available, and give users around the world a first ever chance to search stories and articles on the unique historical events represented in the Bletchley archive.

"The Bletchley Park archive contains hundreds of thousands of documents tracing some of the most significant historical milestones of the twentieth century, including some of the events that defined the outcome of World War II," said Norman Richardson, Vice President & General Manager, HP Imaging and Printing Group, UK. "Our collaboration with Bletchley Park will not only ensure the preservation of this hugely significant archive but will also allow it to be made accessible and searchable digitally for the first time, untapping the value of this content for the benefit of audiences all over the world. We are hugely proud to be working with Bletchley Park and its team of volunteers to make this exciting project a reality."

"Bletchley Park is delighted and very grateful to HP for being its partner in the digitisation of the extensive archive held at the Park, through the very generous donation of a suite of high quality digitisation equipment, software and ongoing technical support," said Simon Greenish, Trust Director, Bletchley Park Trust. "This will help preserve and considerably increase access to the historic fragile materials, as well as enable researchers to see and study documents from the code-breaking work that took place during World War Two. There can be few archives which contain material that had such a profound impact on the world at the time and which is still relevant today. The project represents a considerable technical challenge and without the help from HP and the top end technology now in place, this project would not be happening."

For further information on HP, go to: www.hp.com/uk

For further information on Bletchley Park, go to: www.bletchleypark.org.uk

-END-

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