Preservica educational series

Welcome to the "How we do it" Video Series

Below, we have compiled a series of videos from Records Managers and Archivists in City and County Government to share how they quickly and easily perform common electronic records preservation and access tasks with Preservica’ s solutions.

How to fill a public records request

Transparency of government operations and decisions to the public is of the utmost importance. Sharing meeting minutes and videos are one of the ways that public sector employees meet compliance and open records regulations. A user from our Starter community, Brad Houston – Records Officer for the City of Milwaukee - walked us through his set up in Starter for an efficient way to respond to public records requests- using a Common Council meeting video as his example. Using Starter to preserve and share the video, Brad is able to:

• Offer a timely response to records requests
• Transfer files from dark storage
• Transform large complex legacy file formats with ease
• Digitally preserve permanent government records
• Provide access to citizens via an online public portal

Brad covers the process in just a few minutes so please watch his walkthrough here:

How to fill a research request

In this next installment of the “How we do it” Educational Series, Preservica user Tina Ratcliff from Montgomery County shares with us how she fulfills research requests for Probate Estate Case Files using Preservica Starter, our Free up to 5GB solution.

Tina shares her process for preserving and sharing these traditionally large and complex files, and the ease of sharing with her public portal, instead of the bulky solutions she has used in the past. Her solution provides a better user experience for the requester and the public staff. Watch her video below to learn how to do this yourself. If you want a downloadable guide, we have one available in the Community Hub - sign in to see more!

How to preserve social media content

In this next installment of the “How we do it” Educational Series, Preservica's Gareth Bennett explores how to capture and preserve permanent records and historically valuable content directly from the sources in which they are born. This can include sources like videos, images, documents, websites, emails, and even social media accounts, like Twitter.

Learn from Gareth as he shares how to automate the capture and preservation of social and web content and how to collate and present relevant assets to your target communities online. Watch the video below to learn how to do this yourself. If you want a downloadable guide, we have one available in the Community Hub - sign in to see more!

How to fill a historical records request using scan on-demand and Preservica Starter

In this video, you can learn an easy, quick way to respond to historical records requests with Massachusetts Town of Concord’s Nathanial Smith - Municipal Archivist and Records Manager. He shares how he was able to preserve the program created for the 150th Anniversary of the historical battle of Concord. In this session he shows his process for scan on-demand, preserving digital surrogates of historical records and how he is able to share with the public.

He also talks about some of the challenges he faces and how he handles them including, COVID restrictions, streamlining digital file storage, transforming physical records to be made available electronically, preservation of permanent government records and providing easy access to historical collections via his Preservica public portal.

How to create and share a collection of historical exhibition materials

In this installment of our “How we do it” series, Christy Costlow from Travis County, Texas, one of the largest counties in the United States, shares with us one of the projects she used Preservica Starter for; Preserving and extending the life of exhibition materials- in this case, Elected Official photographs.

Christy walks through how her small team was able to share this new archive of Elected official photographs securely via the Preservica Starter public portal, allowing the citizens of Travis county access to these exhibitions. This solution can be used for many other exhibitions beyond county officials. Check out Christy’s use case below.

How to bring community history to life using Preservica Starter

In this video, you can learn an easy, quick way to preserve and provide access to your historical assets. The Committee Chair for the Cottonwood Heights Historic Committee (located within City Government in the State of Utah), Jim Kichas explains his process for selecting and digitizing a historic personal account and making it accessible and searchable through the City’s website.

The Historic Committee was faced with a common problem – wonderful paper collections of history just sitting in boxes. Jim and the Committee were searching for a way to bring these collections to life in the digital space.

Follow along with Jim as he explains his process and how Cottonwood Heights Historic Committee's collection went, as Jim describes “From a box in the closet, to something that’s online and accessible 24/7 to anybody in our community interested in learning more about the area.”

How to preserve and share the legacy of your county

Archives are treasure troves, full of rich pieces of history. However, the variety of materials can make accessibility a challenge. In this video, Rebekah Davis, Archivist at the Limestone County Archives in Athens, Alabama shows how she’s able to overcome this challenge and preserve and share the legacy of her county with her community. You’ll learn how leveraging automated workflows and an integrated portal in Starter, enables the community members of Limestone County to self-serve and find the content that they need.

Rebekah shares how this accessibility has unlocked major visibility for the archive, including:

• How a local newspaper utilized the archive for historical articles
• How members of the community were able to provide feedback through crowdsourcing to improve the record

Watch the video below to join Rebekah as she shares, how to:

“Use the Limestone County Digital Archives to give a history lesson, provide some entertainment – infotainment, if you will -and do positive outreach. We had a lot of positive feedback from the community and our County Commissioner.”

How to provide easy online access to grantee and grantor indexes

Learn a quick way to provide easy online access to Grantee and Grantor Indexes for Title Researchers with Britni Gorman, the Providence City Archives’ Deputy Archivist.

In her video, Britni explains how title research requests, like many research requests, can often be a lengthy process to fill. Title Researchers working on legal work for land such as boundary disputes, need to request access to Grantee and Grantor Indexes that the Providence City Archives keeps in books dating from 1647-1900s. Researchers are often looking for a certain person within a certain timeframe - this kind of research requires a lot of cross-referencing of the various indexes throughout multiple in-person visits to the archive. Britni notes that this can be an extremely time-consuming process - both for staff and researchers.

This process has become increasingly challenging due to office closures, limited in-person visits, and other restrictions due to COVID.

How did Britni and the Providence City Archives overcome this challenge and streamline the process to allow Title Researchers to self-serve? Watch this video to find out.