University of the Arts London selects Preservica for ambitious new digital preservation initiative

UAL chooses Preservica’s secure AWS cloud-hosted active digital preservation platform to safeguard its unique art and design special collections.

Oxford, UK and Boston, MA - March 23 2018: University of the Arts London (UAL) has selected active digital preservation specialist Preservica to future-proof its unique art and design collections.

UAL is a World Top 6 university for art and design according to the QS World University Rankings®, and is the largest institute of art and design in Europe. Made up of six globally established art and design colleges, the University houses more than 120 special collections, including book art, film, fine printing, product design, tailoring, textiles, and ceramics, amongst others.

The new platform is part of UAL’s cutting-edge approach to its digital environment. With significant advances in virtual reality and gaming UAL is aligning its digital systems to meet the demands of a new generation of student.

The UAL Digital Archives & Collections Project is being delivered in collaboration between Library Services, IT Services and collection managers across the university and its six colleges. The aim is to consolidate unique digitised and born-digital material into a single trusted and accessible digital preservation system. The new platform will increase access to UAL’s digital collections for teaching and research, facilitating better collaboration with communities, prospective students and alumni.

The Preservica active digital preservation platform will enable the UAL Archives team to migrate digital files to newer formats over time, ensuring they can be read and used by future generations of lecturers, students, researchers and the public. It will prevent the risk of UAL’s valuable digital collections being lost or corrupted, as media and file formats become obsolete.

Preservica was selected by UAL after a full discovery and procurement exercise. Preservica was viewed as a cost-effective and proven digital preservation solution capable of supporting the University’s diverse needs. UAL will initially use Preservica’s cloud-hosted digital preservation platform to future-proof 10TB of digital material.

Jessica Crilly, Associate Director, Content & Discovery, Library Services at UAL, said: “The university is investing in digital preservation to keep our digital assets safe and usable over the long term; digital preservation is an important element of our digital infrastructure, and a foundation from which we will provide increased access to digital collections for teaching, learning and research for the university and the communities that we collaborate with.”

Mike Quinn, Preservica CEO, said: “UAL is home to some incredible and significant archive, museum and special collections, and we are very pleased to have been chosen to help safeguard this digital material for future generations. We look forward to welcoming UAL to our global user community that includes a rapidly growing number of libraries, museums and academic institutions such as MoMA, Yale, the University of Manchester, and nearly 50 other university and college libraries.”

About UAL

University of the Arts London is the world’s sixth best university for Art and Design in the QS World University Rankings® 2018. We offer an extensive range of courses in art, design, fashion, communication and performing arts. Our graduates go on to work in and shape creative industries worldwide. The University draws together 6 renowned colleges, each with its own world-class reputation. Our state of the art facilities include workshops with letterpress machinery, studio theatres, gallery space as well as libraries and archives for research into hundreds of years of the greatest artists and designers. www.arts.ac.uk

About Preservica

Preservica is changing the way organisations around the world protect and future-proof critical long-term digital information. Available on premise or in the cloud (SaaS), our award-winning active digital preservation software has been designed from the ground-up to tackle the unique challenges of ensuring digital information remains accessible and trustworthy over decades.

It’s a proven solution that's trusted by a growing number of businesses, archives, libraries, museums and government organisations around the world - including the Associated Press, Texas State Library and Archives, MoMA, Yale, the Curtis Institute, the World Bank, the Sainsbury Archive and HSBC - to name a few.

Visit: www.preservica.com Twitter: @preservica

Media enquiries

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