Piql Plug-in Flyers

Archival planning and cataloguing

Piql is the best choice for helping you to optimise and enhance your archive.

By implementing a best practice approach to your archive’s organisation and functionality, you can extract far greater value from your information and records. An optimised cat- alogue will improve searchability and ease of use, providing opportunity for future monetisation of your content.

ital records. Over the years, if the catalogue or database is not maintained, reorganising and gaining control can be a daunting task. Some archives may even hold multiple databases or diverse catalogues and systems, creating a challenge for ensuring consistent and effective management. Sub-optimal management of an archive can result in infor- mation loss, data decay and corruption and undervaluation of the archive itself. Digitisation and preservation can present valuable oppor- tunities for the repurposing and increasing the life of your information, however these projects are next to impossible without a functional catalogue or database.

THE CHALLENGE

Archives are comprised of documents ordered along some principle of organisation, based on catalogued metadata that facilitates search and retrieval. The larger the collection of documents, the more important the metadata is for nav- igating and deriving value. Many archives transitioned from physical management to digital in the late 1980s and include both analogue and dig-

USECASE

We provided expert archival organisational services to help a government client optimise the value of its large and diverse archive. The 20-year-old archive, consisting of both digital and physical copies, had been maintained in several generations of systems. The client wanted the entire archive to be collated and preserved digitally. To provide cohesion between their diverse data types and systems, we created the archive catalogue for the entire period by extracting and collating the metadata from all the records management databases that had been in use. The paper records were then digitised (with rich metadata extraction) to complete the catalogue. The final result was a complete and functional catalogue and document repository, enabling advanced searchability and a sustainable archival strategy.