As part of a major digital transformation project, the Norwegian Armed Forces Museum was looking for a solution to meet its requirements for a long-term information storage strategy. Through a partnership with Piql, the Museum is taking a new approach with a holistic end to end solution for safeguarding its valuable digital assets.

BACKGROUND

The Norwegian Armed Forces Museum is the Norwegian Defence authority responsible for cultural heritage. With seven different departments, it covers a wide range of museum and archival tasks for the Norwegian Defence Force. The documentation of the museum goes back more than 100 years, and in 2017 a large digitisation project was initiated. This project has been digitising photos, videos, and sound pieces to better understand what historical information was stored in the different locations around the country, as well as making it accessible for the public and future research.

CHALLENGE

A report from the Office of the Auditor General in 2017 found the level of digitisation and preservation in Norwegian museums was not adequate and required attention.
Building on the digitising project, the Armed Forces Museum sought external guidance for help on a long-term information storage strategy and Piql was invited to assess the Museum’s needs and requirements. Clearly understanding that the needs of the museum expanded beyond long-term storage, Piql and the Museum engaged in a holistic archival process, to better understand the whole process.

Through development of a digital workflow, Piql was able to better understand the user need and challenges as part of the daily routines of the archive. A project was scoped to implement a simple and user-friendly solution to match the needs for easy access, quick overview, secure long-term storage and integrations with other systems.

The collaboration with Piql has given us the knowledge and expertise to long-term archiving and storage that ensures our valuable content is securely safeguarded for future generations as an integral part of our long-term strategy of digitisation and archiving in the Museum.

Jan Ingar Hansen, Project Manager, Norwegian Armed Forces Museum

SOLUTION

Early on it was clear that Piql’s latest product, piqlConnect would offer the Museum strong benefits in data administration for archiving responsibilities in the museum.

With the collected digital files from the various departments and the digitisation hub, Piql implemented piqlConnect, mapped to the workflow of the Museum to lighten the interaction with other work processes, both in terms of different digitisation streams as well as an necessity to coordinate with other systems. The Museum could then easily upload files to be stored according to international standards of archival packages. The files are also instantly accessible and highly secure through a Scandinavian cloud provider.

A selection of the most important assets was also chosen to be stored offline on piqlFilm, Piql’s own long-term storage medium. This ultimate copy will ensure the data remains unchanged and accessible no matter the length of time. By ensuring future access and authenticity of this data, they will always have a safe copy of the data stored in one of the departments of the Museum and in the Arctic World Archive. This part of the project benefited from piloting activities under one of Piql’s Horizon 2020 projects, piqlFilm-GO.

The Museum also chose to purchase the full solution, which includes an in-house piqlReader to efficiently access all offline information, as part of their long-term storage and access plan. The new piqlReader has won an DogA award for its compact and stylish design and ease of use. This project has been led by project manager Jan Ingar Hansen, responsible for building up an in-house digitisation hub, which will be instrumental to the transformation within the organisation.

FUTURE

Piql and the Norwegian Armed Forces Museum will continue to develop the partnership by enhancing the features and integration of piqlConnect with other parts of the digitisation and archival process. In addition we will be continuing to develop the support expertise building within the Museum on digitisation and preservation of valuable historical content.

Piql are thrilled to collaborate with the Norwegian Armed Forces Museum in an exciting partnership focused on protecting a valuable collection of Norwegian cultural heritage.