Wales Consortium Digital Preservation System

1.1 Digital preservation refers to the series of managed activities necessary to ensure continued access to digital materials for as long as necessary, beyond the limits of media failure or technological and organisational change. [Digital Preservation Coalition Handbook: Glossary]. Digital Preservation is not the same as Electronic Document Records Management and cannot be managed by an EDRMS.

1.2 Glamorgan Archives (part of Cardiff Council) is the lead partner for the Wales-wide consortium seeking to procure an active digital preservation system that mitigates risks to digital information requiring long-term or permanent preservation (both born-digital and digitised information).

1.3 The wider consortium is made up of members of Archives and Records Council Wales (ARCW), and includes all of the local authority archive services in Wales (numbering thirteen), along with a number of university archive services (numbering five). The Consortium is being supported by Welsh Government with funding for the first year of the implementation of a digital preservation system for Wales. A full list of all partners is available at Appendix 1.

1.4 Not all of the consortium partners are in a position to proceed with the implementation of a system at present, but it is expected that they will join in when they are ready. Therefore the list of services who are in a position to proceed is currently:

• Glamorgan Archives (lead)
• Gwent Archives
• West Glamorgan Archive Service
• Cardiff University Special Collections and Archives
• Swansea University Cultural Collections
• University of Wales Trinity St. David’s Special Collections and Archives
• Conwy Archives
• North East Wales Archives (a joint service between Denbighshire and Flintshire)

1.5 Members of Archives and Records Council Wales has been working together for over a decade on possible solutions for digital preservation and this has laid a number of the foundations for the implementation of a system, such as policy, workflow, principles, dedicated PCs and some training, etc. The partners have drawn up a wide-reaching business case that explains the reasons behind the need for such a system as well as an options appraisal outlining the best course of action.

1.6 Following on from that options appraisal it was decided to work together in a consortium that all public archives in Wales were invited to join, in order to procure a trusted active digital repository solution with separate tenancies of the software for each archive service. This option ensures data security for each partner (as all partners would manage access to their own instance of the system), whilst allowing for the services to work together for mutual support and knowledge sharing, as well as putting in place a cost-effective solution for all partners. In addition, a single procurement exercise will remove duplication of effort across all bodies. It was also agreed that this option would prove the most sustainable, both financially and practically, for all archive services in Wales.

1.7 Despite some differences between the local authority archive services and university archive services, they all have some core functional requirements that they share:

• The need to acquire and preserve digital records from a range of third-party organisations and individuals;
• The requirement to ensure that the records are placed in a trusted digital repository for legal, evidential and authenticity reasons;
• The need to manage highly sensitive information;
• The need for public access to those records to be provided and/or maintained (where appropriate);
• The need to demonstrate compliance with sector standards;
• The need to ensure the seamless transfer of digital records from their parent bodies, including from legacy systems and extracting records from third-party systems such as Microsoft Sharepoint or other record-keeping databases. Additional information: Please see attached Scope of Requirement for further details