The University of Nottingham has chosen a partner to support the digital preservation of its manuscripts and archive material.
Preservica – a cloud-hosted active digital preservation platform – will safeguard and collate the resources, as well as develop new usability tools for the historical records.
The university library has collected manuscript and archive material since 1950 and has created an archive for staff, students and members of the public, containing more than three million records across 700 archive collections.
The Manuscripts and Special Collections department now holds nationally designated collections, including papers of political, diplomatic, literary, scientific and academic figures, including D.H. Lawrence, and several special collections of published works.
The university’s Manuscripts and Special Collections department will initially tackle a backlog of more than 70,000 digitised objects and born digital records which require urgent digital preservation. This will expand to active collection and preservation of the digital records from across the university and its communities.
“Preservica’s open APIs will enable digital preservation to be integrated with our other library systems,” said Mark Dorrington, keeper of manuscripts and special collections.“This flexibility and interoperability allows us to continue to build a digital environment which promotes open discovery and collaboration.”
The new system will integrate with the library’s existing catalogue and library management platforms. This includes integration with Alma and Primo, and an ‘out-of-the-box’ catalogue integration that will enable a synchronized view between Preservica and the University’s archive catalogue, Axiell Calm.