A Leading Academic Medical Center: Preserving an Institutional Legacy with Preservica
Supporting the access and digital preservation needs of internal staff, academic researchers, journalists and the general public
Key Takeaways
Preserving content for the long-term
Years of digital records scattered across shared drives and DVDs are now protected in one system, and automatic generation of access copies ensures that every record remains usable
Enterprise level security
The institution operates within a strict IT governance environment where open-source alternatives simply weren't viable - Preservica meets rigorous security and compliance requirements without compromise
Seamless discovery & access to records
Integration with their existing research catalogue, a staff self-service portal, and planned SharePoint connectivity make finding and contributing records effortless.
Overview
A prestigious US nonprofit academic medical center with over 160 years of history, our client operates across three major campuses with tens of thousands of staff, serving patients both nationally and internationally with clinical practice, research, and education.
The Archives serves as the institution's official memory, with a team of archivists preserving and providing access to a rich collection spanning governance records, personal papers, photographs, films, oral histories, and publications. The archives operates a tiered access model serving internal staff, researchers, journalists, and the public, with a research catalogue integration underway to enable unified discovery.
Challenges
The Archives faced a range of significant operational, technical, and organizational challenges prior to adopting Preservica:
- Infrastructure: Digital content had accumulated across shared drives and DVDs - fragmented, unsustainable, and at risk of format obsolescence and hardware failure. No systematic framework existed to ensure the long-term accessibility or integrity of digital holdings.
- IT environment: The institution's strict enterprise IT security governance ruled out the use of open-source preservation tools. Any solution needed to meet rigorous security and compliance requirements while delivering professional-grade preservation functionality.
- Organizational and compliance complexity: Transitioning from reactive to proactive collection development required new policies, clearer scope definitions, and improved ingest workflows. Pre-modern privacy legislation materials may contain personally identifiable information, requiring identification and remediation before ingest.
Solution
Following a thorough evaluation, the institution selected Preservica as its digital preservation platform:
Decisive factors
- Broad file format support - ensuring content remains usable as formats evolve over time
- Automatic access copy generation - reducing manual processing effort and improving accessibility at scale
- Enterprise IT compatibility - meeting the institution's strict security and governance requirements where open-source alternatives could not
Implementation progress
- Integration with the existing research catalogue underway for unified content discovery
- Self-service staff portal planned for internal access to historical records
- SharePoint integration planned to streamline ingest and reduce friction for contributing staff
- Informed by peer implementation experience, including participation in a system-wide user group at a previous institution
Looking Ahead: AI and Preserve365
The Archives team is actively exploring how emerging technologies can extend the value and accessibility of the collection.
AI priorities and ambitions
- Leveraging AI to make collections more discoverable and accessible, through automated transcription of audiovisual content, OCR processing of scanned documents, and natural language search capabilities
- AI-generated alt-text to improve accessibility across the collection, ensuring materials are usable by a wider audience
- AI-assisted enrichment to significantly reduce the manual effort required for cataloguing, enabling the team to work more efficiently at scale
Preserve365 plans
- SharePoint integration planned to create a seamless ingest pathway for staff, embedding good records management practices into everyday workflows across the organisation
- Broader ambition to ensure that today's decisions and milestones are preserved with the same care as the records of the institution's founding generation