Jersey Heritage has chosen Arkivum Perpetua to store and preserve the huge volumes of digital records in its care. Holding the complete public record of States of Jersey, a photo archive of around 1.5 million images and digitised artefacts such as registration cards from the German occupation during World War Two, Jersey Heritage tells the story of life on the island up to the present day.
“We were looking for a digital preservation system that would help us meet our legal obligation to look after all archive materials,” says Linda Romeril, Archive and Collections Director at Jersey Heritage. “That meant managing the items we digitise as well as the born-digital assets we increasingly receive. The digital archive had grown so much that our local servers were holding 20 terabytes of data. Processes such as authenticity checks had to be run manually, which was time-consuming. And the risk of data loss and corruption was an overriding concern.”
Arkivum Perpetua is a digital preservation and archival safeguarding solution designed with the specific needs of the heritage sector in mind. “Archives such as Jersey Heritage now handle an array of formats – from images, videos and audio material to documents such as PDFs,” says Paula Keogh, VP of Heritage & Higher Education at Arkivum. “They have to test for authenticity, manage format obsolescence, and above all keep all their digital assets secure. With Arkivum Perpetua, Jersey Heritage can now reassure the organisations and individuals contributing to the archive that their irreplaceable materials are in safe hands.”
“We felt that Arkivum really listened to us and understood what we needed,” says Linda. “Our new system will give us all peace of mind. We’re having a new physical strong room built at the moment, and I see Arkivum Perpetua as its digital equivalent, giving us confidence that we can preserve a vital part of Jersey’s history for decades and centuries to come.”
