Making history accessible

KING EDWARD'S SCHOOL

King Edward’s School is one of the leading independent schools in the UK. Founded in 1552 by King Edward VI, it is one of the most successful and diverse boys’ schools in the country.

The challenge

The school wanted to mark the centenary of the Great War (WWI) and to commemorate over 1400 ex-pupils who served in the conflict. They were keen to find a way to showcase and share information around each of these individuals but had no real means of handling or displaying this data as part of their exhibition.

There was a lot of data available but it was all highly unstructured and very difficult to make use of, which is why they came to Register Dynamics seeking some help.

How we helped

Our team developed an automated data flow system, which enabled us to transform the thousands of former pupil’s biographies into easy-to-use structured datasets.

We were able to extract useful content and to build complete profiles for each and every pupil, matching up scanned images alongside tabular data. We also expanded on the biographical data where we could, for example, adding more information around medals awarded to various soldiers for their service.

We also worked with a graphic designer to create an iPad app and website specifically for the exhibition. This was used to easily display all of the biographical data and to facilitate an easy and fun experience for exhibition attendees.

The result

The exhibition was a success and the school now has all of their biographical data available to access, use and share with others whenever they want to.

We saved our client hundreds of hours of manual work and created a long lasting technological solution for their data.

Through our technical leadership and our careful implementation of specialised digital data engineering techniques, we were able to carry this project out at a competitive rate, with no manual processing required, whilst yielding high quality results.

Through our work, we are proud to know that we have helped to ensure that the pupils of King Edward’s School who served in the First World War will never be forgotten.