Case Study: Berea College achieves preservation and public access for 100TB of Appalachian archives with Preservica

Berea College - Customer Case Study

Berea College’s Special Collections and Archives preserves a rich, one‑of‑a‑kind record of Appalachian history—particularly large sound and video recordings documenting traditional music, oral histories and community life. The collection had grown to nearly 100 TB, with some video files exceeding 500 GB, stored on a variety of obsolete formats; the college needed a reliable way to migrate and preserve these complete files (including ambient audio) without loss while also making them broadly accessible.

After selecting Preservica Cloud Edition in 2015, Preservica demonstrated a proof of concept, integrated with Berea’s IT ecosystem (including ArchivesSpace), and used its Bulk Upload Service alongside AWS Import/Export to securely and efficiently move the collection to the cloud. The outcome is durable digital preservation plus a public access front end on Berea’s archives website—expanding research access, protecting the materials long term, and earning praise from Berea’s archivists.

Berea College

Rachel Vagts

Head of Special Collections and Archives