Online Digital Catalogue and Archive Management Solutions (ERO Online Digital Catalogue)

Description

Essex Record Office (ERO) is seeking to engage with the market to understand available solutions and supplier capabilities that can support the modernisation of its archive management, digital preservation and public access services.

ERO is undertaking this Preliminary Market Engagement (PME) exercise to inform future procurement activity and ensure that any proposed solutions align with the organisation's statutory responsibilities, service requirements and long-term digital preservation ambitions.

ERO is looking to understand the market's ability to provide solutions that can deliver the following outcomes:

• Replacement of the current in-house developed Archive Management System (SEAX), which underpins over 80% of ERO's operations and public-facing services, including income-generating online services.
• The archive management system will need to:

o facilitate viewing the catalogue on-site at Essex Record Office locations and online

o provide free access to digital and digitised collections on-site at Essex Record Office locations

o provide online access, outside of ERO locations, to digital and digitised collections via a subscription service

o facilitate the creation of user accounts with role dependent security/access levels

o provide a paywall to access certain collections

o manage the personal data of users of the service, including taking payments from them

• Support for statutory archive, records management and civil registration functions.
• Secure, scalable and standards-compliant digital preservation capabilities to support the long-term preservation, integrity and accessibility of digital records. We require a solution for preserving digital records with retention periods of 100 years or more, as well as potentially shorter retention periods. The solution must be able to deal with a variety of file formats including proprietary software files and a range of sound and moving image files.
• Progression towards National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) Level 4 digital preservation maturity. Specifically, we require:

o For digital records storage: three copies in at least two geographic locations (storage will need to be in the UK or EU)

o A means of controlling, auditing, and recording file permissions

o A means of recording sufficient metadata about the files using an appropriate metadata standard e.g. METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard), PREMIS (PREservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies), BagIt (BagIt File Packaging Format) and/or Dublin Core

o Periodic integrity checking and disaster simulation, and a means of regularly updating the results of these checks

o A means of recording details of people and software that have accessed or taken preservation actions on files.

• Improved management and discovery of digital assets through modern digital asset management capabilities.
• Enhanced public access, search and discovery through modern online archive and catalogue services.
• Improved customer journeys and increased public engagement.
• Support for current income generating services and potential for enhanced income generation opportunities.
• Integration capabilities with existing and future corporate platforms and digital services.
• Modern, intuitive and user-friendly interfaces for both staff and public users. As a minimum, we will need:

o The ability to allow members of the public to access suitable digital preservation files

o A means of providing redacted access copies of the content where necessary

o A means of recording when files have been accessed and by whom

o A means of ensuring the content is protected from unauthorised changes and any loss

• Scalable architecture capable of supporting current digital holdings of 88.8TB and significant future growth over the coming decades.
• Strong governance, audit, compliance and security features to support statutory and regulatory requirements, including the Public Records Act, Freedom of Information legislation and Data Protection requirements.

Background

Archive Management System

It is estimated that over 80% of the work of the ERO is currently managed through an in-house developed tool called SEAX. SEAX was created by Essex County Council as a bespoke system. It was created over 25 years ago in a now archaic programming language. Seax Explorer was written in VB (Visual Basic) and uses forms to create the different screens of its various modules (e.g. Catalogue Manager, Accession Manager, etc.). These forms have been written in a custom language based loosely around XML and are stored within the Seax Explorer database.

The online element of the system is known internally as Seax PAM and to the public as Essex Archives Online. This includes our online catalogue and income-generating subscription service and income-generating single-image service. Seax PAM was written using .NET framework and C# and is currently using an old version of .NET framework.

We are seeking a modern, sustainable and future-proofed solution for managing our requirements for accessioning, cataloguing, storage locations, document production, reader management and user access (at the ERO and online).

The ERO has a staff of around 25 people. Up to 12 users are likely to require login access to the staff side of the AMS, including generic logins for Searchroom staff, document production staff, volunteers, etc.

Digital Preservation

As of July 2026, the ERO has 88.8TB of digital data. This figure is expected to grow at an estimated rate of 5TB per year. Within the 88.8TB of data, 3.3TB consists of born-digital records; the other 85.5TB being content the ERO has digitised from its manuscript, image, sound and video collections. This data is all currently stored on Microsoft Azure Cloud Storage.

Most of the content is listed in basic form on a spreadsheet. Detailed metadata at file level is being added as resources allow. Further documentation about rights is kept in separate filing and on our archive management system (alongside information about our paper and analogue collections). The ERO has a dedicated ingest PC through which we process digital collections as they arrive. We are able to take images of disks using ISO Buster software, transfer files as they are or transfer them to a file format with greater longevity. Transfers can be made using Teracopy software and we can interrogate the files we receive using TNA’s Droid software.

The main element of NDSA (National Digital Stewardship Alliance) Digital Preservation Level 1 we are not currently achieving is the requirement to have two complete copies of our digital content in separate locations.

Our aim is to progress through the NDSA digital preservation levels to meet NDSA Level 4.

Areas of Interest

ERO is particularly interested in understanding solutions relating to:

• Archive Management Systems (AMS)
• Digital Preservation Management Systems (DPMS)
• Digital Asset Management Systems (DAMS)
• Preservation storage and hosting solutions
• Public catalogue and online archive access platforms
• Migration services from legacy archive systems
• Integration and API capabilities

Contract Considerations

At this stage, ERO is seeking supplier feedback on:

• Appropriate contract lengths and commercial models
• Implementation and migration timelines
• SaaS, cloud-hosted and hybrid delivery models
• Opportunities for phased delivery across AMS, DPMS, DAMS and public access capabilities
• Scalability to support long-term digital preservation requirements.

The information gathered through this PME will help shape ERO's future procurement strategy, solution design and business case development.