ITT (CF) - Digital Preservation System - UID 226M

Historic England is undertaking Preliminary Market Engagement (PME) to improve its understanding of the Digital Preservation System (DPS) marketplace and inform future procurement requirements. The system will support the ingestion, storage, integrity management, and ongoing preservation of high-value digital assets, including photographic and archival material, ensuring compliance with relevant standards and best practice for digital preservation.

The engagement is intended to:

• Increase understanding of available DPS solutions.
• Identify common and differentiating capabilities.
• Understand implementation approaches.
• Explore pricing and support models.
• Inform future procurement requirements.

This exercise is not a procurement and is not intended to identify a preferred supplier. The procurement will be conducted via a formal tender process following the finalisation of requirements. This pre-market engagement aims to better understand market capabilities and inform the development of clear, proportionate, and achievable requirements.

We have identified five suppliers who we will be engaging with to ensure a proportionate market assessment based on the following:

• Demonstrable experience in digital preservation systems, particularly within archival, cultural heritage, or research sectors
• Ability to support UK public sector requirements, including data protection and security expectations
• Experience of delivering cloud-based or hybrid preservation solutions
• Representation of a range of supplier types (e.g. SME, open-source providers, and enterprise platforms)

We are unable to invite more suppliers to this process, due to the level of staff time that we could allocate to reviewing the information received. We welcome all responses to the Invitation To Tender stage which will be advertised later this year.

Suppliers identified will be asked to do the following:

1. Provide written responses to the questions contained within this document
2. Deliver a remote system demonstration

Please see the background that will be provided to the suppliers, all information provided will be included in the Invitation To Tender once we begin our competitive procurement procedure:

Historic England Context

Historic England (HE) (officially the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England) is an executive non-departmental public body of the UK Government sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS). It is tasked with protecting the historic environment of England and advising central and local government on historic environment matters.

The Historic England Archive (the Archive) is the national archive of the historic environment in England. It holds over 15 million items and is one of the largest collections in the UK. From early photography from the 1850s to contemporary collections, we hold major archive collections of national importance, caring for them now and for future generations. Content is mostly photographic, but also includes large collections of drawings, plans and related documents covering archaeology, architecture, social and local history. The Archive supports and delivers on an important part of our organisational mission to champion and protect the historic environment. It holds these records as part of the wider Archive under the powers given to the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England (Historic England) under the National Heritage Act 1983 and has been a Place of Deposit for public records under s.4(1) of the Public Records Act (1958) since 1995.

The Archive team is responsible for digital preservation at HE and will own the outcome of the proposed procurement. We operate with the following standards: OAIS, PREMIS, Dublin Core, ISAD(G).

Our digital archive contains 72TB of born digital data and further digitised material, giving a total data pool size of 100TB. This is growing at a rapid and increasing pace. Over the past few years expansion has been:

Year Expansion of born digital Expansion of digitised

2023 5.8TB 2.45 TB

2024 7.47TB 1.54TB

2025 8.93TB 0.66 TB

2026 (projected) 9TB 1.7TB

We expect this trend to continue, with increasing quantities of born digital material due to increased size of files from digital cameras and the requirement to care for an increased range of data, including 3-D data, CAD moving image and survey data.

The new DPS will need to have the ability to interoperate with the following systems:

• Collections management system – currently using Adlib, but with plans to move to another system in the future, after the DPS is in place.
• Internal Historic England DAMS system (ResourceSpace).
• Our online resources, see historicengland.org.uk/images-books/photos/ ↗

The main limitations to our current setup, which we are seeking to solve are as follows:

• The digital archive is managed in a DAMS system (Portfolio) which does not provide full digital preservation of assets. The system has been fulfilling the role of both digital archive and access system.
• Content is stored in instant on-premise access storage which has a higher financial cost and a greater carbon footprint.
• Disproportionate time is spent on manual ingest and data management processes.
• Rates of deposit are rising rapidly for both born-digital and digitised content and we require a secure system which can process and safely store content at scale.
• The need to be able to care for large complex datasets, including point cloud data and 3D models, which should be kept as part of HE’s archive are not currently in archive storage.

The successful reaccreditation of the Archive in 2025 highlighted the need to improve digital preservation provision. The rate of growth and need for more diverse storage architecture has made the introduction of a more robust digital preservation solution a high priority. Through undertaking a procurement process for a digital preservation system we expect to achieve:

• Authenticity of content through recording and managing the integrity and authenticity of all digital archive data and metadata to recognised standards.
• A comprehensive data model that enables the structure of digital objects to be captured with persistent identifiers on ingest and accurately represented over time as they are managed and preserved.
• The ability to assess the characteristics of ingested digital content and record them in associated metadata.
• Storage replication and management facilities, including maintenance of data sovereignty on UK servers.
• Controlled discovery of, and access to, digital content and metadata.
• A system that mitigates preservation risks and has a range of reporting capabilities.
• A clear exit strategy to other systems, without vendor lock in.
• A relationship with the vendor that includes training and support suitable to our needs.
• A system that is compatible with the wider Historic England digital estate.