The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) in the United Kingdom is Europe's largest organization for advancing the chemical sciences. The RSC is also 170 years old -- so it's no surprise the assets it's accumulated since the 1840s would be unwieldy to manage, publish, and otherwise make more broadly available. The recent explosive growth of digital assets has only exacerbated the problem.
A NoSQL database from MarkLogic offered the solution RSC was looking for, unlocking a treasure trove of assets and enabling the RSC to publish three times as many journals and four times as many articles. It also gave the Society the ability to develop new educational applications to make chemistry accessible to a wider audience.
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Supported by an international publishing business and worldwide members, the RSC's activities span education, conferences, science policy, and the promotion of chemistry to the public. Its history is rooted in a combination of societies that were integrated as one in 1980: The Chemical Society, The Society for Analytical Chemistry, The Royal Institute of Chemistry, and The Faraday Society. The accumulated content includes more than 1 million images, millions of science data files, and hundreds of thousands of articles from more than 200,000 authors. On top of that, add the recent capture of social media, video, and other digital content.
Searching RSC publications with MarkLogic
RSC determined the MarkLogic document database was the right solution to create one integrated repository -- and make it easily accessible to anyone online, from entrepreneurs to researchers to educators around the world. The key to MarkLogic is in how it stores content as XML documents: Information that should not or cannot be expressed in a straightforward fashion as rows and columns -- such as contracts, manuals, books, emails, tweets, and metadata -- is well suited to MarkLogic's XML-based, document-centric model.
