Transforming the National Theatre's digital archives into an accessible, intuitive and engaging experience
A behind-the-scenes look at how the National Theatre turned decades of rich but fragmented archive material into a unified, user-friendly digital experience accessbile to researchers and the public
Setting the stage
Since its founding in 1963, the UK’s National Theatre has been a cultural cornerstone, producing world-renowned performances and preserving over 200 terabytes of recordings, posters, programs and photographs. In 2020, led by Digital Archives Manager Dan Heather, and using Preservica’s Enterprise solution, the archives team began to transform the archive into a more accessible, intuitive and engaging digital resource.
Challenges
Despite the scale and richness of its archive, the National Theatre faced several persistent obstacles:
- Fragmented Metadata: A significant volume of useful metadata—especially for production rehearsal photographs—was trapped in disconnected spreadsheets, not integrated with the legacy collections management system (CALM).
- Non-Standard Schemas: Much of this metadata was structured in a bespoke, internally developed schema, incompatible with recognized standards like Dublin Core or ISAD(G). This made integration, sharing, and user interpretation difficult.
- Limited Front-End Functionality: The legacy front-end system (CALM View) was cumbersome, with poor support for rendering digital images alongside metadata, discouraging meaningful digital access.
- Scale and Complexity: With over 200TB of content and 150,000 items requiring metadata rationalization and ingestion, the sheer scale of the work made it feel overwhelming, leading to delays and inaction.
- Internal Buy-In: The technical aspects of the classic Preservica interface discouraged participation from non-specialist staff, limiting cross-departmental engagement in digital archive work.
Results
To overcome these challenges, the National Theatre adopted Preservica’s New Generation, enabling new capabilities and collaboration across the archive team:
- CSV-Based Bulk Ingest: The team used Preservica’s out-of-the-box CSV import functionality to begin a structured metadata migration. This allowed them to crosswalk legacy spreadsheets into Dublin Core, ensuring consistency and future interoperability.
- Production-Level Workflows: Each production was treated as a discrete ingest unit, allowing the team to structure metadata and images in manageable, intuitive batches. Folder-based ingest supported rich descriptive metadata at both folder and file level.
- User-Friendly Design: The cleaner, intuitive User Interface was compared by staff to familiar platforms like YouTube or e-commerce sites. This familiarity increased confidence and participation among colleagues from analog collections and volunteer researchers.
- Metadata Quality Assurance: The migration process also doubled as a metadata cleaning effort, identifying inconsistencies in file naming, typos and legacy idiosyncrasies. The team used this as an opportunity to establish standardized titling rules and QA processes.
Outcomes
The adoption of Preservica’s New Generation interface led to transformational outcomes across technical, strategic and cultural domains:
✔️ Over 150,000 items ingested with clean, standardized metadata using scalable and repeatable workflows
✔️ Stronger internal engagement with more staff using Preservica confidently and actively contributing to digital ingest
✔️ Improved researcher experience with clearer navigation, more visible item-level metadata, and better discovery within Universal Access
✔️ Increased visibility for underrepresented content including behind-the-scenes creatives like sound designers and choreographers
✔️ Policy shift in metadata strategy with Preservica now considered a primary platform rather than a subsidiary one—a critical shift as the organization prepares to decommission its CALM system
✔️ Future-ready infrastructure with plans to explore Preservica Portal, AI metadata enrichment, and expanding access to remote users and the general public
Key Takeaways
Metadata standardization
Migrated complex metadata into Dublin Core, enhancing description, searchability & user clarity
Streamlined workflows
Used efficient, repeatable workflows to ingest 150,000+ items with clean, structured metadata
User-friendly interface
Improved staff engagement & researcher experience with clearer navigation, richer metadata & easier discovery
Future-ready approach
Planning to embrace AI tools, increasing accessibility & activating Preservica Portal for wider digital reach
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