The Provision of Consultancy to Support a Digital Preservation Pilot Project

Under the 1986 National Archives Act, the National Archives was established to hold and produce publicly the records of Government departments and scheduled agencies. Currently paper records are selected and transferred to NAI after 30 years, when they become ‘open’ to the public. For selected departments closely involved in Anglo-Irish matters, this time frame is reduced to 20 years. The NAI is currently unable to take in born-digital records from government departments. As technology moved to the creation of digital records in the 1980’s and 90’s public records began to move to digital formats, with an increasing commitment to phase out all print-to-file policies. Given these timeframes there is already a significant backlog of born-digital records waiting for transfer to NAI. The National Archives recently commissioned a digital preservation strategy which will support as it transitions to ingest, store, preserve and produce digital records over the coming years, providing the Archives with the toolset to continue to fulfil its role under the 1986 Act. This is a significant project that will take years to deliver and will require the support of DPENDR and the OGCIO given the scale of data involved. As a preliminary step, the National Archives wishes to undertake a pilot project supported by the OGCIO with a small volume of born-digital records (TCAGSM records) which can be ingested into our current server capacity. The recommendation would be to trial a combination of COTS (commercial off the shelf package) and open-source products as part of a pilot phase, running through 2024. We require consultancy support to enable us to deliver on this pilot phase.