Oxfordshire History Centre chooses the Cloud for digital preservation of county records and local history

Preservica, part of the Tessella group, and a world leader in digital preservation technology, research and consulting, is pleased to announce that Oxfordshire History Centre, part of Oxfordshire County Council, has selected Preservica Cloud Edition, purchased through the UK Government’s G-Cloud initiative, as the trusted digital repository for important local historical records. The digital archive will initially amount to nearly 14 Terabytes of storage containing hundreds of thousands of digitised and born-digital objects. The decision reflects growing demand from government departments for a simple and cost-effective way of safeguarding and ensuring long term accessibility to vital records and other digital material.

Oxfordshire History Centre plays an important combined role as county record office and local studies library, with a large, multi-media collection serving researchers, students and the public, fulfilling statutory obligations under the Local Government Act for records retention and transparency. The archive includes local church records, wills and inventories, council and court records, business, estate and manorial records, maps, newspapers and periodicals, photographs, prints and drawings, oral histories and video recordings.

Mark Lawrence, Oxfordshire History Centre, Manager adds “We have a challenging countywide mandate to ensure important records and their historical content are safe and accessible over the long term. Previously our valuable and often unique digitised and born-digital material was dispersed across different locations on a variety of network drives, tape backup systems and portable media such as USB drives. We needed a way to consolidate all this content into a single secure “out-of-the box” system that would also provide full OAIS (Open Archival Information Systems) Digital Preservation, synchronisation with our existing Axiell CALM catalogue system, and an Access module to make it easy to share our digital content with the public in the future”.

“Using the Government’s G-Cloud scheme also made the solution easier to purchase and has provided us with a cost-effective Cloud based solution that securely stores multiple copies of our digital content across multiple locations – which would be costly to achieve using in-house systems. Preservica Cloud Edition will also help us to take a big step forward in achieving accreditation and approval for our service from the UK National Archives”.

Preservica Chief Executive Jon Tilbury adds, “As an Oxfordshire Head Quartered business we are especially proud that the Oxfordshire History Centre has chosen Preservica Cloud Edition to safeguard the historic records of our county. We also fully back the government’s efforts to encourage public bodies to use Cloud hosted solutions, and look forward to OHC’s contribution to the Preservica User Group in helping to shape the future of digital preservation”.

Preservica Cloud Edition, built around the same proven Digital Preservation technology in use at the UK National Archives,  includes  a full suite of OAIS (Open Archival Information Systems) conforming workflows for ingest, management, storage, access and preservation of digital content, as well as all hosting, backup, operations, software maintenance and support. In addition, the solution combines preservation and access in one system, greatly simplifying the task of making open records and materials accessible to the public.

Learn more about at Preservica Cloud Edition

www.preservica.com/preservica-works

Learn more about Preservica Cloud Edition on G-Cloud 6

www.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/service/6259505117528064

Notes to the Media

About Preservica 

Preservica is a world leader in digital preservation technology, consulting and research. Our active preservation solutions are used by leading archives, libraries, museums, government organizations and businesses across 4 continents to safeguard and share their valuable digital content, collections and electronic records for decades to come.

The award-winning Preservica Active Preservation and Access technology is available in cloud hosted and on premise Editions and includes a full suite of OAIS (Open Archival Information System) compliant workflows for ingest, management, storage, access and long-term preservation of digital content.

Preservica invests in many research initiatives in digital preservation and is a well-respected member of many international collaborations with academia, archives, libraries and corporations at the leading edge of this emerging field.

Preservica is part of Tessella group, the international analytics, software services and consultancy company.

Visit www.preservica.com

About the Oxfordshire History Centre

Oxfordshire History Centre collects, preserves and makes available archives, photographs, audio, video and printed material relating to Oxfordshire and its history.

Learn more:www.oxfordshire.gov.uk/oxfordshirehistory