You cannot put a price on what South Australian stories and ephemera lie within the basement of the State Library of South Australia. Irreplaceable written, audio, film/video and image assets, arguably running into millions of dollars, sit neatly preserved in time for future audiences to access and share. Here lie not only the stories of the state, but the knowledge and identity of South Australia that make it what it is.
Preservica is the new world class, cloud-hosted active digital preservation platform that the State Library has just chosen to safeguard its future stories digitally.
Preservica has a prestigious portfolio of clients including the UK National Archives, Texas State Library and Archives, European Commission, Yale University, British Telecommunications, National Library of Australia and many more of similar calibre. State Library Director Geoff Strempel stated,
“Our role is to ensure that current and future generations enjoy, experience, and learn from our South Australian collections and world knowledge. We provide public research and information services, events and programs to enrich access to the collections, and as part of this we know the importance of making sure that the digital material which underpins all our work is safeguarded and accessible today as well as into the future. Partnering with such a noted supplier as Preservica is a significant step on that journey.”
The State Library selected Preservica after an extensive tender process to find a suitable system for preserving and making accessible over 150 TBs of digital material that is currently held on local servers, storage subsystems and a variety of other media including CDs and floppy disks. The library currently receives and generates over 25 TBs of new digital material a year, and this figure will continue to rise.
Preservica’s unique active digital preservation solution will allow these diverse digital collections to be consolidated into a single, easy-to-use system that is fully private and cloud hosted on Amazon Web Services on Australian soil. Being able to receive, ingest and maintain the integrity of large digital archives, and over 1800 digital formats will allow the library to significantly increase its digital collecting activities.
Digital preservation will play a critical part in helping the State Library in their role to collect, preserve and archive, as well as make accessible and share to future generations the stories that so richly capture South Australia’s identity.
Media enquiries
Lucy Guster
Manager, Engagement and Marketing
State Library of South Australia
Mobile: 0409 091 829
Email: lucy.guster@sa.gov.au