War Memorial will never forget digital assets

Just a week out from Remembrance Day, the Australian War Memorial has announced that Alphawest will overhaul its content management systems and is now on the prowl for storage platforms to preserve 100 terabytes of data.

The Australian War Memorial (AWM) is the central war archive for material relating to Australia's military activity since colonisation.

Alphawest will replace AWM's in-house content management systems with 400 seats of Interwoven's digital asset management software, which it will use to manage documents, images, video and sound files.

"This is all part of our preservation strategy, which is ever-evolving, since technology is driving it. It's also about a means of providing public access and delivering a product to people in a timely fashion, whether it's a producer getting an image over the Web or a private individual wanting a print reproduced," Daryl Winterbottom, head of AWM's IT department, told ZDNet Australia.

The purpose of the project is to deliver a system that will safely store digital content in perpetuity, said Winterbottom.

Today AWM has 10 terabytes of data accessible online but there are also vast amounts of data in tape archives, he added.

"But really the big area of growth for us is new born-digital objects [digital content that has not been converted from another source], like stills, sound or video. Video is a big growth area," he said.

AWM is predicting it will have 100 terabytes of digital content to store in the next five years and will soon put out a tender for storage platforms.

"We're going out with a functional requirement rather than being prescriptive about the solution," he said, adding that he is confident there are multiple solutions that could meet its needs.

Since long-term preservation is critical to the department's objective, Winterbottom said whatever storage systems it selects will need to offer constant verification functionality.

The archive system would need to be equipped with the mechanisms to verify and report on the integrity of data, and automatically correct any errors it finds, he said.

"If we're going to achieve constant verification of data, it needs to be online all the time for that to happen. Naturally, disaster recovery copies will be on a static media such as tape or optical and stored off site, which is part of the storage solution."