DM1805

Dm CASE STUDY: THE SAINSBURY ARCHIVE
Superstorage
The Sainsbury Archive is actively preserving digital assets relating to the company's
operations thanks to a digitisation and cloud hosting project
The Sainsbury Archive, which charts
the growth and history of one of
the UK's largest supermarkets, is
implementing Preservica's AWS cloudhosted
platform. The assets to be
preserved currently date from the
opening of the very first store in Drury
Lane, London in 1869, and the Archive
also plans to use Preservica to
safeguard exclusively born-digital
records in the future.
The Sainsbury Archive contains a vast
array of materials including advertising,
brand assets, marketing campaigns,
every issue of the company's in-house
magazine, packaging and product
designs, as well as corporate governance
records such as meeting minutes, board
reports and staff records. The archive
also houses culturally significant items
like daily memos sent to Sainsbury's store
managers during WW2, and Family
business papers. It also provides a
unique record of the transformation that
has occurred in retailing since the mid-
19th century, and the impact of these
changes on society. In 2003 the
Sainsbury Archive was set up as an
independent charitable trust and in 2005
relocated to the Museum of London
Docklands in Canary Wharf.
The archive is used by researchers, the
public and Sainsbury's own internal
teams to gain insight into business and
retail history, shopping and eating
habits, architecture and urban
development, and advertising, display,
and product design. For example,
packaging designs from the 1970s
recently inspired the design of the new
Sainsbury's Bank credit card, as well as
the design of Sainsbury's own-brand
vinyl records.
THINKING AHEAD
The Sainsbury Archive is undertaking a
large-scale digitisation project which
prompted the team to examine its
digital preservation strategy. It is
expected to create around 65 TB of
information, and therefore felt it was
important to ensure its unique digital
material could be safely stored and
future-proofed, using a secure cloudhosted
preservation and access
platform. This is especially pertinent for
material that is currently at risk of
degradation and format obsolescence,
such as film and VHS tapes.
Marcela Bonthron, Sainsbury's Archive
Co-ordinator, said: "Previously we'd been
using local servers to store Sainsbury
Archive valuable data and records, but
the need for a robust approach to digital
preservation soon became clear. It wasn't
just to consolidate and manage the
large amounts of digital records our
digitisation projects will naturally create,
but also to make our unique digital
assets more accessible and ensure they
remain readable and useable by future
generations. Preservica will also enable
us to future-proof the large amounts of
new born-digital information that the
Sainsbury Archive will be acquiring in
the future."
Allison Foster, Sainsbury Archivist at the
Museum of London Docklands, said:
"With a high number of digitisation
projects underway, it was important to
find a digital preservation solution for
our archive that would protect records
from technology and file format
obsolescence, as well as provide wider
internal access. We also needed a system
that could connect with our existing
catalogue, to avoid needing to re-key or
copy metadata. For us, Preservica ticked
all those boxes and more."
Mike Quinn, CEO of Preservica,
comments: "The Sainsbury Archive joins
a rapidly growing number of business
archives using Preservica's cloud-hosted
active digital preservation platform.
They are future-proofing unique digital
assets to inform brand, corporate and
business decisions today and in years to
come. We're delighted to play a part in
helping the Sainsbury Archive safeguard
such an incredibly rich and important
digital archive".
More info: www.preservica.com
20
@DMMagAndAwards
May/June 2018
www.document-manager.com