Iron Mountain Cultural Heritage and Archives solution

Solution Guides

Digitise, preserve and share the past for the future

5 June 20246 mins
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Old book to archive as heritage

Challenge

Your collections are unique and priceless resources of history and culture. They may be stored in wide-ranging locations, including public and private libraries, archives, museums, galleries, colleges and universities, and media and entertainment. Preserving these historic assets is critical; it’s how we as a society learn, use, research, and share our cultural heritage with today’s generation, as well as with generations to come. But what is the best way to ensure access to these resources when they are both fragile and restricted to a physical location? The need to properly preserve cultural heritage and archives for future generations while still enabling access and usage with a broader audience over time is one that many companies, organisations, and governments are struggling to address.

Impact

A large percentage of cultural heritage assets and archives are at risk because they are stored in less-than-optimal conditions, which makes them far more susceptible to damage from handling and exposure to natural environmental conditions. Additionally, natural disasters like fires or floods, along with man-made disasters like wars or political unrest, can potentially put large collections at risk.

What if you could

Leverage unrivalled expertise and prevent further degradation and damage to cultural heritage collections and archives. You could:

  • Protect and preserve the past, making it available in perpetuity for future generations
  • Transform precious physical collections into digital surrogates, preserving the original characteristics and value of an item
  • Use digitisation to enhance accessibility and usage, and share digital assets to promote collections and engage with wider audiences

Iron Mountain Cultural Heritage and Archives solution

Iron Mountain Cultural Heritage and Archives solution is designed to protect and preserve original collections and archives from damage and deterioration. Through digitisation, digital surrogates can be created, managed, shared, and monetised and expand the reach of these cultural items. In fact, having a fully digitised collection removes many physical limitations, bringing unprecedented levels of accessibility to these valuable cultural heritage collections.

Unlike traditional methods of delivering access to cultural heritage collections, digitisation is a powerful strategy that minimises outside influences that could potentially damage or degrade assets over time. Our qualified team of professionals are trained to handle assets with the utmost care to minimise risk of damage while handling in the digitisation process. Each digital surrogate delivers enhanced access, enabling an item to be examined exhaustively, yet remain physically safe to retain all the rich detail and value of the original item. And with the option to offer online access, institutions can consider alternative storage options, like the possibility to relocate original collections or archives to a more stable and less expensive storage facility, enabling onsite collections to grow, or even repurposing valuable space.

Just as every cultural heritage asset is unique, often one-of-a-kind, the approach that you require needs to be as unique as your collection. Our expert archivists provide this unprecedented level of end-to-end, hands-on service that is tailored to your collection’s exacting demands. Our climate-controlled environments are specifically designed for storing vital records, assets, high-value art, and other valuable items. Our proven history in consultation, project management, cultural heritage handling, transportation, preservation, image capture, and archiving makes Iron Mountain the natural choice for your organisation.

Once digitised, your collections can be shared online and utilised to promote your institution and enable remote researchers, breaking down both regional and cultural barriers whilst enjoying appreciation from a much larger global constituency.

Our industry-leading capabilities and archival expertise help protect what you value most, safeguarding your collections through your transformation, enabling secure and trusted transit, storage, and digitisation, and helping you to take care of your collections throughout the journey from physical to digital.

Iron Mountain Cultural Heritage and Archives solution

can preserve a broad range of physical and digital cultural heritage and archival formats, including but not limited to:

book

Paper-based assets

 
 

Paper-based assets

  • Records and manuscripts
  • Books and bound materials
  • Photographic prints
  • Large format documents
  • Drawings and designs
  • Maps
  • Digital born documents
media

Media

 
 

Media

  • Film
  • Video
  • Audio
tape conversion

Transmissive

 
 

Transmissive

  • Negatives and transparencies
  • Microfiche and microfilm
  • Aperture cards
art

Art and artefacts

 
 

Art and artefacts

  • Paintings
  • Sculptures
  • 3D art
  • Artefacts and objects

Clear business benefits

Your organisation will receive clear benefits through partnering with Iron Mountain and using our Cultural Heritage and Archives solution:

  • Protect and preserve the past for the future:
    Our professional team can help your organisation to lay out a plan for the preservation of your one-of-a-kind collection or archive. By utilising our consultation, stabilisation, transportation, and storage services we can partner with you to manage the end-to-end process with a secure chain of custody throughout. Digitisation is handled with utmost care throughout the process by trained personnel in strict, environmentally controlled facilities to maintain the current state of original collections, free from further damage or deterioration.
  • Transform your physical collections:
    Highly accurate digital surrogates created by our team of experts to the highest International standards and guidelines, become the springboard for many new opportunities to expand your collection’s reach, globally, so that they can be accessed, managed, shared, reproduced, and even monetised. Rigorous quality controls will be in place for imaging accuracy during the digitisation process. We can also enhance and create descriptive metadata at scale using artificial intelligence (AI), to improve the visibility, interoperability, and availability of items across collections and to facilitate research. Lower resolution images can be generated for distribution through different channels. Digital surrogates of original assets can be stored on Iron Mountain InSight® Digital Experience Platform (DXP) or the content repository of choice.
  • Make the most of digital collections and archives:
    Once these valuable, cultural heritage assets are digitised, the sky is truly the limit for novel use cases. Digitisation is the basis for creating new, richly immersive experiences for your audiences, enabling them to engage with cultural heritage collections with unprecedented accessibility, all with zero risk to the physical asset’s condition. The digital reproduction of an asset facilitates greater levels of cooperation, enabling users and researchers around the world to access and collaborate in new shared experiences that only digitisation can deliver while also providing full digital rights management and control over intellectual property. 
ringing telephone

Contact Iron Mountain to learn how we can help you transform and maximise your cultural heritage collections and archives, expanding your reach in new ways with better accessibility.

Contact us