Archive services

Tender description

The Houses of Parliament wish to give notice of a potential contract opportunity for a Digital Repository. The solution must be capable of safely, securely and actively preserving large quantities of data. It must also be able to adapt to future demands and work with existing technologies, processes and infrastructure. The solution must provide the following: — automated ingest of simple and complex digital records from a diverse range of sources into the repository, — a means by which digital records and their associated metadata may be permanently and securely held and managed, preserving them using both bit-stream and content (or logical) preservation approaches in a usable and authentic form, — effective and usable discovery and access services for members, staff and the public, subject to appropriate access controls. Parliament currently operates a solution which aligns with the Open Archival Information System Reference Model (OAIS: ISO 14721:2012). Parliament’s current Digital Repository preserves digital records consisting of images, documents (e.g. Word or Excel), email, video, and mixed media (e.g. websites and social media feeds). A future Digital Repository needs the capability to preserve digital representations of physical and functional characteristics of places, and potentially structured datasets and code, — parliament currently has a Digital Repository in place, the new contract should take all previous digital preservation work and archived data into consideration, — the work will primarily be performed on the Parliamentary Estate, and the provider will be expected to work closely with Parliament’s Digital Service and Parliamentary Archives staff in the design and delivery of the solution. Parliament will consider flexible solutions which can incorporate legacy and new infrastructure, including the use of cloud services.