000646 Digital Asset Management and Preservation Solution

The British Library is the UK's national library, with an ever growing analogue and digital collection.

Our digital collection is a combination of digitised and born digital, voluntary and legal deposit content that is currently maintained within a bespoke, internally developed digital repository system.

Legal deposit content in the system is collected and maintained on behalf of all six legal deposit libraries in the UK, under the Non-Print Legal Deposit Regulations (2013).

The current digital repository architecture utilizes a custom-built digital library system and metadata repository storing almost 1PB of content, with new ingest rates of approximately 1.5 TB per day but anticipated to grow to 5-10TB per day over the next few years.

Items are replicated across 4 storage nodes located at library premises at St Pancras, Boston Spa, the National Library of Wales and the National Library of Scotland.

Content (sound, video, e-books, images etc.) and metadata held in these systems must persist despite changes in the surrounding technical landscape.

The rapid growth in recent years, both in the volume and variety of digital content collected, has necessitated a significant uplift in the functionality, capacity and performance of the system.

The complexity, costs and timescales involved make continuation of the current bespoke development approach impractical This procurement is the first in a series of infrastructure renewal projects and we therefore have some flexibility in the exact scope of the product to be procured.

Nonetheless, the purpose of this procurement is to select suppliers who can clearly demonstrate their capability and capacity to meet some minimum requirements in the following five key areas: • Ingest • Data Management • Architectural Fit • Preservation Planning • Operational Service and Contractual • Implementation and Migration • Archival Storage • Access