As mentioned in last post, the methods to use digital archives on new-era media is different from manage archives in museums and galleries. Here I will briefly summarize two cases about how these traditional cultural institutions manage their digital archives.
1. The Parliamentary Archives – mixed storage solutions: cloud + localhost
The Parliamentary Archives is an institution which works for managing historic records from the House of Lords and displaying some of its collections for public audiences. By weighing the strengths and weakness of various storage framework, the parliamentary procurement office finally decided to prioritize cloud solutions and built an ICT policy about digital repository in 2012.
There are mainly two reasons about why they choose a combined approach to store data. On the one hand, the amount of digital materials is considerable, including both second-hand digitization and born digital ones, which has reached 50TB yet. Also, with the increasing number of quantity, the complexity of formats adds more difficulties to the storage task. Apart from the standard Office types such as PDF and JPEG, the materials are diverse in forms, such as CAD, Audio Visual (AV) and TIFF. On the other hand, local storage system has advantages in data confidentiality and privacy safety if we compare it with the cloud method. So that storing sensitive materials in its locally hosted system- Preservica Enterprise Edition while using the public cloud to store open data will be a sensible choice to protect private information. Besides, during this process they manage to fulfill the legal obligations such as sovereignty and Freedom of Information, etc., which meets for the requirements of ethics and legal issues.
From the aspect of technical infrastructure, they use CALM as a system for archive cataloguing and interacting with Preservica Enterprise Edition. In particular, Portcullis, which is a bespoke online delivery system is applied in this joined storage case, aiming to offer visitors the access to digital repository content. In this way, the end users, i.e., the visitors who viewed the digital materials through the Internet can check separate copies of original archives independently. While the electronic content contained in cloud will be stored deeply and securely.
2.Tate Gallery – sharing a centralized system across four organizations
The rationales of using a centralized storage system for cross-branch management of digital collections in Tate are as follows. Firstly, Tate has four branches in United Kingdom, which have started their digitization process since few years ago, but it is still remained in a relatively early phase. Secondly, compared to traditional galleries, Tate aims to broaden its horizons and enroll more born digital collections in the near future, e.g., audio visual artworks or digital archives, which may challenge the management of digital assets. Because it can be impractical to set the same standard for all artists, i.e., the artworks will be displayed in various forms and they can be impossible to predict. Thirdly, it is estimated that Tate may need 2 petabytes (2,048 terabytes) space to meet the requirements of enrolling increasing digital resources.
So that establishing a centralized archive repository system becomes an inevitable need, in order to significantly increase the efficiency of managing the digital resources. In addition, Tate Gallery created a special position named Digital Preservation in 2013, for the task of coordinating the implementations and communicating with different departments.
Unlike The Parliament Archives, Tate Gallery did not use a localhost to preserve archival data, they issue this responsibility to an external business company, Arkivum，which perform well in offering effective control over the locations within the storage system. It has been a common sense that one of the most critical meanings of building cloud system for digitized files is that users can be able to search or reuse them conveniently, which represents a lasting value through ages. But this appears to be a dilemma for those born- digital assets, for the technology-driven tools keep evolving continuously, which may cause a loss of confidence from users about their long-term access to the digital resources. To solve it, Arkivum continue developing comprehensive cooperative relations with Open Source software, therefore they can guarantee the ‘100% data integrity’ and maintain the inner peace of mind of an out of the box solution. Also, assessing the metadata workflow is included in the service provided by Arkivum.
More specifically, Tate Gallery divided its digitization missions according to different types of technical tasks. For example, TMS is used as a gallery system of managing electronic artworks, while Axiell’s Calm is responsible for cataloguing archives.
References:
Arkivum: http://www.arkivum.com/ Calm: http://www.axiell.co.uk/calm Digital Preservation in Parliament: http://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/parliamentaryarchives/digitalpr eservation/ National Archives: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/archives-sector/case-studies-and-research-reports/case-studies/ The Museum System (TMS): http://www.gallerysystems.com/tms