Archive services solution brief

Solution Guides

Preserve, organize, and access your organization's rich operational heritage

July 20, 20236 mins

Preserve, organize, and access your organization’s rich operational heritage.

Corporate archives are a treasure trove of institutional knowledge, weaving a rich story of your company’s history, operations, mission, and brand. These collections continue to grow in volume—and value—yet funding and resources struggle to keep pace, creating challenges to effectively catalog, access, and utilize the information within.

Plus, items are often siloed across digital and physical locations and are spread across boxes, cabinets, hard drives, and websites. Organizations often lack adequate visibility into the breadth of assets and their various locations.

Keeping corporate collections properly protected is one important piece of comprehensive archival services. However, the power of effective archival management comes in the ability to efficiently rediscover and reuse assets, by tapping into documents, products, photos, memorabilia, videos, and the like to better inform, engage, and innovate across your enterprise.

By partnering with Iron Mountain you benefit from:

Successful and safe delivery of your projects on schedule
Global presence with a local footprint to support all your office locations
Our expert team of archivists with in-depth knowledge of collections handling, classification, and care
Proprietary tools and workflows designed for rare and specialty collections
Secure and scalable digitization of various print and media formats

Are you on a mission to achieve any of the following goals?

Keep your corporate history alive and accessible
Reduce your physical archiving footprint to support digital transformation
Minimize the stress and cost of growing archival requirements
Introduce archiving efficiency without sacrificing protection and security
Enable users to find archived assets quickly and easily
Create and capture archiving processes for cross-company coordination
Tap into existing intellectual property
To optimize new product development
Leverage existing information to support legal requirements

Rely on trusted experience and solutions

Wherever you are on the archiving journey, we offer a full suite of solutions and resources to help your organization plan, develop, manage, and execute your corporate archiving initiatives. Our archivist specialists work with your team to uncover new innovative ways to streamline processes and introduce efficiency and cost savings.

Whether you want to create secure digital access points for collections, improve inventory and tracking, or enhance long-term preservation tactics, our approach is backed by best practices and strategies leveraged by peer companies solving similar challenges-designed to scale and adapt to best support your business.

Proper handling of special collections and archives

Projects involving special collections and archives can introduce risk if proper care and handling is not prioritized. We have developed methods, tools, and equipment for managing fragile and rare archival materials to ensure collections receive proper stabilization, inventory control, and chain of custody.

Discover how Iron Mountain can help

Corporate archive solutions and services portfolio

Planning and consulting

Gain instant access to an experienced team of archivists and logistics experts to determine your company’s archiving requirements, prioritize short- and long term activities, and craft a comprehensive plan to evolve and grow a successful corporate archiving program. Considerations for you to explore include requirements tied to physical and digital storage, staffing, and information security.

Physical preservation of corporate archives

Collection relocation

Your corporate archives are precious and proprietary, and they deserve to be treated as such. Whether you’re executing a temporary move or relocating collections into long-term storage, your items have unique handling and storage requirements that require specialized relocation planning, preparation, and implementation. Lean on Iron Mountain to ensure your relocation goes smoothly, meeting timeline and budgetary requirements, and leveraging best practices to address unique stabilization, packing, transport, and storage needs to keep collections safe and accessible for future researchers.

Collection storage

To better utilize or reallocate existing physical spaces, many organizations are moving collections to offsite locations. Take advantage of our various local storage options, including multi-tenant or private vault storage, while maintaining the ability to work onsite with materials within your collection. Storage recommendations will address your company’s security requirements, providing protection of intellectual property, separation of materials as needed, and a trusted chain of custody. In addition, choose from desired access controls and methods, providing accessibility via employee requests, our online portal, or integration with your existing content management system. Plus, our environmental controls maintain the integrity of your collections, ensuring that even the most valuable and rare items are properly cared for throughout.

Digital conversion and preservation

Archival digitization

Take advantage of our full suite of digitization services to image and protect valuable corporate collections for historical and cultural purposes. We have deep experience in archival digitization, combined with extensive preservation knowledge and support for a wide range of materials, such as manuscripts, bound volumes, oversized items, newspapers, photographs, print negatives, paintings, and three-dimensional objects. Whether you have a small project or are looking to digitize your entire corpus, we have the breadth of capability and infrastructure to provide at-scale archival digitization with the quality and care that you need.

Each project is scoped and configured to your company’s requirements from local corporate standards to industry guidelines, such as Federal Agencies Digital Guideline Initiatives (FADGI), with options for preparation, metadata capture, imaging, reassembly, and file delivery. We also provide solutions to host collections, provide digital storage, and offer advanced search and discovery capabilities using artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Media digitization

Preserve your company’s valuable audiovisual and media assets to prevent inherent deterioration. Iron Mountain provides digitization and restoration solutions for a multitude of media formats, providing digital facsimiles of analog formats to create usable resources for employees and stakeholders while preserving the original content.

Archiving management resources

Staffing resources

Whether onsite or remote, executing large projects at scale with expert staff helps reduce costs and accelerate delivery. We can provide you with staffing resources to ensure the accurate, timely, and successful delivery of your corporate archiving projects while scaling personnel support to align with your budget.

Inventory and tracking resources

The start of a digitization or relocation project provides an excellent opportunity to update collection inventories and databases. We provide a range of digital and physical resources to improve asset tracking capabilities, such as identifying and correcting classification discrepancies, implementing barcoding and RFID tagging, and updating records catalogs. With improved archive inventory and tracking, researchers and archivists gain insight and access to accelerate corporate projects, enabling individuals to focus on additional high-value work.