Rather than deleting intervals between recital sound recordings to reduce file size, Berea has kept all files in their entirety in an effort to capture an end-to-end cultural experience, complete with background chatter from the audience. The video files were especially large files, with some files over 500 GB each. For a liberal arts college with an annual enrollment of 1,600 students, this is an unusually large volume of digital material.
The migration of such a large collection was an important consideration in the project and had to be perfectly planned and scheduled so that nothing was lost.
In 2015, after an extensive research and selection process, Berea selected Preservica as its partner of choice to help preserve and protect its collection, and to make it publicly accessible.
“The Preservica team is fantastic to work with,” says Rachel Vagts, Head of Special Collections and Archives at Berea. “They have come up with a solution that works perfectly, and we always have a variety of people to answer our questions.”
During the selection process of determining what would work well for us, it quickly emerged that Preservica was the most economically feasible choice for the institution. “They have been a great technical resource that has not broken the bank,” says Vagts.
Solution
The first challenge the collection presented was that, because of the college’s desire to allow access to the large collection, they needed not only a digital preservation system but also an access front end. To solve this issue, Preservica was able to easily integrate with the archive’s existing IT ecosystem, including the ArchivesSpace application.
Preservica submitted a proof of concept document that met all Berea’s requirements, including their Cloud requirements, which would preserve the collection and make it universally accessible to the wider research community.
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