IT services: consulting, software development, Internet and support

Tender description

Early Market Engagement - Essex County Council is interested in meeting with suppliers to discuss the further development and marketing of their Seax tool. Essex County Council (ECC) provides a high-quality archive service through the Essex Record Office (ERO). The ERO is the custodian of unique and irreplaceable historic records relating to Essex spanning the past thousand years, and it makes these records available through a range of services benefitting users and customers in Essex, the UK and internationally. One of ECC’s strategic aims is to transform itself to achieve more with less. As a contribution to this aim, and as an adjunct to the considerable commercial activity it is already engaged in, the ERO is exploring the possibility of developing and marketing its in-house archive management software platform (known as Seax) for use by external institutional customers. Seax was created & developed by ECC IT specialists to operate as a catalogue database designed specifically to manage archive collections, but also as a comprehensive archive management system including modules to deal with accessioning, storage and retrieval of documents, as well as ‘reader management’. It provides online access to EROs public catalogues (www.essexarchivesonline.co.uk). Many of the descriptions in the catalogue include high-quality digital images of the records themselves. When viewed online, some of these images can be accessed for free, but for most digitised records users need to register and buy a subscription. Seax has a public-facing element – for users both online and in the public Searchroom at the ERO – and a ‘back end’ element used by staff managing the collections and the public service. ECC is now seeking to understand the options available with regard to the further development & marketing of the system to a wider customer base, via different commercial models.