The Gazettes

The Gazettes

The London, Edinburgh and Belfast Gazettes are the Official Newspapers of Record in which official and statutory notices are published. In addition, a number of specialist supplements provide information from appointment of officers in the armed forces through to unclaimed premium bond prizes and the Queen’s Honours List.

The challenge

The Gazettes are complex publications with over 5,000 customers placing more than 200,000 notices each year. The London Gazette is published daily, the Edinburgh Gazette twice a week and the Belfast Gazette weekly so TSO works to very tight deadlines.

Traditionally advertisers submitted notices to the Gazettes by post, fax, or email, which were then re-keyed into a typesetting system ready for publication.

The National Archives, on whose behalf the Gazettes are published, is committed to conforming to the e-government priorities by developing electronic submission and processing.

The information provided in the Gazettes is very important so must be published accurately and efficiently, in a way which is easily accessible for its readers whilst maintaining a high level of confidentiality and security.

The solution

TSO introduced a sophisticated electronic processing system using XML tagging to provide advertisers with a specialist template to generate notices for online submission. The infrastructure also enables customers to check their submission and run a validation programme to minimise the chance of errors.

The new system means that the formats for output have improved with data now available print, PDF, XML, RDF:XML and Comma Separated Variable formats amongst many others.

Users now also find it simpler to access the information provided in the Gazettes with many formats widely available free of charge.

TSO recently mashed up London Gazette insolvency data, Ordnance Survey boundary data and Google Maps to support local democracy through provision of a view of insolvencies within each local authority and council ward.

Service mix

• Multi-format publishing
• Managed service
• Web design
• Investment in technology and data applications including open data

Results

•       80% of notices are now submitted electronically to the Gazettes
• Data outputs are available in more forms than ever before, and RDF data is available from the website or RDF store
• Gazette data now forms an important constituent of third party applications such as http://opencorporates.com and Twitter feeds such as Football Notices and Road Traffic Notice and a data source for much of the banking, insolvency and credit information industries
• Quality of data and accuracy targets are consistently achieved