Preservica Had Liverpool Record Office as Customer

The Liverpool Record Office, part of Liverpool City Council’s Libraries and Information Services, has chosen Preservica‘s cloud-based active digital preservation software to create a new online archive and to digitally preserve culturally significant records dating back to the 13th century.

The cloud-based system will enable greater use of the archive’s digital collections by academic researchers, the local council, community groups and the general public. Currently many requests to the archive are handled manually with material transferred and made available on CDs and memory sticks.

The Record Office, based at Liverpool Central Library, will start with the ingest of its large photography collections, including thousands of digitised images from the City engineers collection, dating from 1897 to 1995, which documents the work done by the department and is of local and national value. It is a detailed record of almost every aspect of the development of the city, which was, for much of the period in question, the second commercial city in England.

The archives also include the Letters Patent from King John, signed on 28th August 1207, to mark the beginning of the city of Liverpool. Other highlights feature the large archive of the Merseyside Jewish Community that dates back to the 18th Century, and the Everton Football Club collection containing football shirts, programmes and correspondence from Liverpool’s first football team.

Much of the material requires digitising, including oral histories collections, which are stored on a combination of VHS, audio cassette and other obsolete mediums. Some of the analogue material has not been accessible for many years and so the Record Office will use Preservica to ensure the council’s digitised (and born-digital) materials are not only useable by future generations, but also readily accessible online.

In its search for a digital preservation system, the archives team used the UK government’s G-cloud digital marketplace to learn about Preservica, and to do comparisons and streamline the procurement process. Preservica’s active digital preservation software provided a cloud-based solution without the need for local IT resources. This included an out-of-the-box connector to the existing CALM catalogue and a customised online portal for controlled public access to digital collections and records.

Liverpool City Council’s Digital Archivist Carl Kenneally highlights how the system will increase the value of the archives: “Previously, public access to digital collections was limited but as the collections are uploaded to the cloud, Preservica will enable us to showcase and drive interest in them online to a much larger audience than ever before. This will help us to really demonstrate the value of the archive and the role it plays in highlighting the incredible cultural history of the City of Liverpool.“

Preservica CEO Mike Quinn says: “We welcome the Liverpool Record Office to the growing community of UK local authorities choosing Preservica to meet government mandates to safeguard and provide greater public access to digital records and collections. Using Preservica hosted in the cloud is a secure and cost-effective solution for many local government institutions, and we look forward to working with the team at Liverpool City Council to protect and showcase the value of Liverpool’s unique cultural and historic assets.“