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The Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) is the latest organisation to install the Flax enterprise search system as part of a major online news development known as eClips. eClips allows press cuttings agencies and their customers online access to a database of national and regional newspaper content in text and PDF format from a central resource, the first time direct access to articles from multiple titles in image form has been available. 

Andrew Hughes, Managing Director, NLA Digital said ‘NLA is pleased to be improving the ability of users access articles in text and image form with eClips. Installing Flax technology has helped us offer our users better and faster searching of news content.’

The Flax software, which powers eClips, was developed by Lemur Consulting in Cambridge, and builds on established open-source software. 'Flax is much more than just a search engine' explained Charlie Hull, Managing Director of Lemur. 'We’ve taken a world-beating core – used by organisations from the German newspaper Die Zeit to Cambridge City Council – and added software allowing it to build indexes of hundreds of different kinds of files, emails and databases. We’ve also added several different types of front end so that Flax will fit seamlessly into a company’s existing infrastructure'.

Flax can build searchable indexes of millions of documents in common formats such as Microsoft Office, HTML and Adobe Acrobat (PDF), which can then be searched in milliseconds using a customisable interface to meet specific needs. Flax is cross-platform and provides highly accurate and relevant results.

'The days of closed-source, low-performing search engines are gone', said Hull. 'If your system doesn’t cope reliably with millions of documents, for a sensible price, then it simply isn’t suitable for today’s business environment. If the system is a closed-source ‘black box’ you have no way of verifying that it does what the vendor says, and maintenance and improvement is more difficult.. Flax’s performance and reliability has been well demonstrated and is improving all the time.'

Support for Flax is provided by Lemur Consulting; search engine specialists with a reputation for quality service and support. Lemur will customise, install and configure a Flax solution to meet an organisation’s specific needs and will supply ongoing maintenance, software updates and support as required.