PROCAT Digital Service Rebuild
The procurement contact named on the official notice.
This is a large award for IT Services — above three-quarters of comparable contracts. Based on 36,449 valued IT Services tenders in our corpus.
PROCAT is a bespoke service which was commissioned by The National Archives (TNA) in 1999\2000.
It was built to catalogue public records, to provide an end-to-end service for both staff involved in cataloguing records, and for the public searching TNA's online catalogue via our public website.
A service (SAR) controlling access based on PRA principles, was added soon afterwards.
Although the public catalogue access is now supplied by the Discovery service, PROCAT and SAR are still in use every day for preparing descriptions of newly accessioned paper records and revising descriptions and access to existing TNA paper records. ("Paper" here stands for any records not born-digital).
The service is built with components (web pages, search engine, SQL database and batch processes) of that era which have lasted well.
However, many elements are now obsolete and are increasingly incompatible with any modern servers used to provide the service.
There are significant risks due to this technology: That the service may fail catastrophically (=not recoverable) at any time.
Continued operations pose a cyber security risk due to use of insecure browser technology.
TNA has already commissioned a discovery process to detail the problem areas and outline a route to a transitional architecture which will partly replace those obsolete and cyber risk components.
The aim is to provide a stable service prior to complete replacement.
This avoids both the risks inherent in a "big bang" complete replacement project and maintains the service while other elements of the successor architecture are defined.
TNA now wishes to identify a delivery partner to deliver the transitional architecture.
In summary these are: Improve data ingest for large scale data loads ("accessioning") and large-scale access control ("change Open\Closed status") Replace Active X based activation of an XML editing tool for markup Replace an obsolete search engine used for detailed search of the existing catalogue by inhouse ("TNA staff") users
What the supplier must deliver
It was built to catalogue public records
It was built to catalogue public records, to provide an end-to-end service for both staff involved in cataloguing records, and for the public searching TNA's online catalogue via our public website.
However, many elements are now obsolete
However, many elements are now obsolete and are increasingly incompatible with any modern servers used to provide the service.
The aim is to provide a stable
The aim is to provide a stable service prior to complete replacement.
TNA now wishes to identify a delivery
TNA now wishes to identify a delivery partner to deliver the transitional architecture.
Derived from the notice text — always confirm against the original documents.
Skills, tools & certifications
Detected from the notice — the capabilities and credentials this bid calls for. Click one to see who wins that work.
Make the case to bid
Reveal who to approach at The National Archives, and generate a go-to-market strategy from their news, accounts and people.
- OCID
- ocds-h6vhtk-051556
- Stage
- planning · Planning
- Source
- Find a Tender
- Buyer ref
- 022042-2025
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Source data © Crown copyright.
Who wins this kind of work
The suppliers and buyers around this opportunity — drawn from official award data. Drag to orbit; click a node to explore.
Top suppliers & buyers in IT Services
The National Archives’s tender network
Assembling the network…