Safeguarding the past, shaping the future: A guide to digitising cultural heritage

Executive summary

Every year, thousands of artefacts are lost. Museums, private collections, libraries, public institutions, and others experience material degradation, media obsolescence, theft, and even collection risk as a result of lack of appropriate storage facilities and climate change. These artefacts are not just lost assets; due to their uniqueness, they represent a loss of our culture, our history, and our identities. To counteract this reality, preserving our cultural heritage is a vital mission. It safeguards our past and historical roots—for learning, research, and sharing—and enriches our collective future.

Admittedly, cultural preservation is easy to say and challenging to do. Yet, it is an urgent call to action. That’s because many one-of-a-kind cultural heritage assets and archives are aged, fragile, and susceptible to damage from handling, light exposure, and environmental conditions. With climate change and world events in constant play, “doing nothing” allows further degradation or destruction, elevating the risk of losing historical assets and archives—forever.

Fortunately, digitisation helps us both preserve and make accessible our cultural heritage assets and archives. It creates accurate digitised representations of original works to make digital surrogates, reducing the need for physical handling while making images available to a global audience. As a result, digital copies of cultural assets can then be shared online, transcending geographical barriers and allowing people from different parts of the world to study and appreciate these treasures remotely.

While digitisation is recognised as a priority to protect and preserve collections, it requires an initial investment, specialised equipment, and highly experienced personnel. Collections can then be reproduced into accurate digital surrogates that adhere to industry standards with metadata that improves the visibility, interoperability, and availability of cultural heritage collections and archives.

Here’s how to start your journey to digitise and protect our invaluable and irreplaceable cultural heritage assets and archives. Iron Mountain is passionate about and committed to preserving our shared cultural heritage. Together, we can undertake this imperative mission and positively impact many future generations to come.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

George Santayana, said this in his 1905 book The Life of Reason

As Charles de Lint said, we are all made of stories. Our stories are inextricably intertwined and passed down from generation to generation, giving our lives meaning and context. It’s vital to keep sharing our stories, history, and culture with current and future generations. That’s how we remember, learn about, and share our collective cultural roots while honouring those who came before us.

As archivists, collectors, conservators, curators, librarians, historians, and faculty, you manage unique and priceless collections that are tangible artefacts of our communal stories, history, and culture. Preserving these historic assets is crucial. The cost of not fully protecting and preserving our cultural assets is steep— and often irreversible. That’s because what’s lost, stolen, or destroyed is often gone forever.

But preserving these singular, historic assets is also fraught with inherent and lofty challenges. Yet, the ability to safeguard our past and shape our future relies on overcoming them.

Navigating lofty challenges

Cultural heritage assets and collections are one-of-a-kind and span a wide range of diverse formats—all types of bound materials, documents, manuscripts, art, media, audio, video, historic records, photographs, and others— and are located all around the world. Regardless of location or format, they are fragile and subject to gradual degradation from environmental, handling, and storage conditions. Other factors such as conflicts, natural disasters, climate change, human-induced events, and the passing of time are outside of our control and play a part in damaging and erasing cultural heritage.

In addition, physical assets and archives are often restricted to specific locations that might not be open to the public, limiting their accessibility to a broader audience. This makes it difficult to share assets beyond the physical walls of the archive, and offers expanded opportunities for research, education, enjoyment, and potential monetisation.

Simultaneously, collections are growing at unprecedented rates. These further strains limited staff resources, compounds space and storage limitations, and increases the cost of dedicated, physical real estate for storage. Often these constraints result in collection holdings that are not accurately or comprehensively understood - essentially resulting in hidden information which introduces additional vulnerabilities.

Together, these factors create a “perfect storm” of escalating—and alarming—levels of risk to the safety, understanding, and preservation of our cultural heritage.

Leveraging digital technology

To mitigate these risks, digital technology has emerged as an effective way to protect, preserve, and share our cultural heritage worldwide. The goal of digitisation is to create access in perpetuity by preserving, stabilising, and digitally converting and storing historic assets and archives.

For example, in Austria, the Niederösterreichisches Landesarchiv organisation wanted to digitise and permanently secure official documents and testimonies from the Holocaust and the Nazi regime. Many of these holdings are fragile paper files, handwritten notes, public records, and photographs. Working with Iron Mountain, a tailored imaging solution was used to digitise and capture historic records while maintaining a highly secure, full chain of custody.

As a result, the organisation spent less effort retrieving files, leaving more time for improved indexing and archiving of older holdings. The organisation reduced risks of damage and decreased restoration costs. Researchers gained faster access to comprehensive historical records while unleashing new opportunities for international academic researchers who can access documentation online. Most importantly, as Dr. Stefan Eminger, Head of Contemporary History at Niederösterreichisches Landesarchiv, observed about the digitisation process, “No archival record has ever been damaged.”

Read more here

Digitising historic assets: Five must-have capabilities

(and how Iron Mountain meets the five must-haves)

Achieving results like Landesarchiv requires the proper, end-to-end, customisable deployment of digital technology, the primary determinant of effective preservation. For cultural heritage and archives, digital technology solutions are not all created equal. That’s because cultural heritage preservation is a highly specialised, unique capability and is often bespoke for each application and asset. Must-have characteristics that meet the deployment requirements of digital preservation include:

1. Specialised expertise

Properly handling the one-of-a-kind cultural heritage assets requires deep and specialised expertise. First and foremost, expert archivists must be involved in designing the end-to-end solution and consult with digitisation experts throughout the process, to ensure digitisation requirements meet your specific needs. Beyond archivists, you need best in class transportation services, and material handling specialists who know how to manage one-of-a-kind, precious historic assets with unique care and proven expertise.

Iron Mountain’s specialised expertise. Iron Mountain has a robust staff of professional archivists, librarians, and art handlers to provide insight into global best practices and with a laser-sharp focus on protecting and preserving collections. These trusted experts and their consultation and solution support have proven outcomes with historic assets time and again.

The Iron Mountain end-to-end solution covers paper documents, books, art, and media assets. Specially trained personnel assess the condition of your cultural heritage portfolio, prepare, stabilise, and transport to global scanning and storage sites, digitise the assets, and create high-definition digital copies. Digitisation is in line with industry standards and can be used, managed, reproduced, shared, or monetised. Iron Mountain also offers storage facilities for original physical portfolios to extend the lifespan of the collection for future generations to enjoy.

2. Compliance

As digitisation evolves, it’s important to understand and comply with ISO 19264 image quality standards and best practices and achieve objective, preservation-grade image quality. Globally, the two most highly regarded guidelines are the Federal Agency Digitization Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) and METAMORFOZE. As the defacto image quality guidelines for preservation, FADGI and METAMORFOZE standards comprise several quality tiers, which help guide digitisation requirements.

Iron Mountain’s approach to compliance. The Iron Mountain team is highly skilled at aligning with appropriate international standards, including ISO 19264, FADGI, and METAMORFOZE. Many of these trusted Iron Mountain experts are accredited and have deep, proven experience in achieving compliance with archival standards and best practices.

3. Long-term support

Preservation and protection are long-term commitments and require ongoing scalability and customisation as collections expand and change. That means a partner with comprehensive end-to-end solutions, services, and support with a breadth of resources for scalability helps to ensure the success and longevity of cultural heritage preservation and protection programs.

Iron Mountain’s long-term support. With a 70+ year history, Iron Mountain understands adaptability and longevity. This is especially true in the areas of archival preservation and protection. That’s why Iron Mountain’s portfolio of services and support, paired with a wide range of resources with deep expertise, can provide scalability and customisation as collections evolve. Iron Mountain partners for the long-term to grow together with organisations and institutions.

4. Specific technical expertise

Archival assets require specific technical expertise in systems, archival-level digital conversion, metadata, and digital storage. This enables collections to be shared with larger audiences and monetised. Having resources and experience in these areas is an important partner capability for organisations and institutions that may not have the resources on staff to provide technical expertise.

Iron Mountain’s specific technical expertise. Iron Mountain archivists, librarians, and technicians are highly skilled in providing and adhering to structural and descriptive metadata practices, following international standards Solution experts can also enhance and create descriptive metadata at scale using artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the visibility, interoperability, and availability of items across collections and to enhance research. Metadata can also be extracted from digitally-native documents to enhance discoverability across collections and share with a wider network of experts and collectors.

5. Global reach

Worldwide presence has advantages for cultural heritage preservation. Although organisations and institutions may have location-specific artefacts, they may be archived in another country or continent. Partners with global reach help to comprehensively cover the full gamut of historic asset preservation needs.

Iron Mountain’s global reach. Iron Mountain is present around the world with resources, offices, data centres, and storage facilities. Serving 225,000 organisations in 60 countries, Iron Mountain supports over 90% of Fortune 1000 companies. Iron Mountain’s global footprint provides a distinct advantage to organisations and institutions focused on preserving and protecting cultural heritage assets.

Taking action

To advance the preservation of cultural heritage, we must take action and do so quickly. But no one company or individual can do it alone. Preserving our collective stories also requires collective action—partnering to safeguard our past and enhance our future. As a partner to leading museums, collectors, libraries, and institutions around the world, Iron Mountain is firmly established as a proven, trusted resource around the world.

Iron Mountain is committed to and passionate about the protection and preservation of our cultural heritage. We stand ready to help you on your journey, no matter where you are in your journey or what your unique situation requires. Together, we can create a lasting legacy from many generations before us to many future generations. That’s a story we can all be proud of writing.