Case Study: Boston City Archives achieves national access and a living, sustainable digital archive with Preservica

Boston City Archives use Preservica to make digital records accessible at a national level

Boston City Archives, which houses Boston’s permanent municipal records, needed to move from scattered paper holdings to a sustainable digital strategy for growing volumes of digitized and born‑digital material (emails, websites, photos, video, and documents). The challenge was preserving these records, making them easily searchable and accessible to the public and researchers, and doing so without the burden of managing complex local IT infrastructure.

By adopting Preservica’s cloud‑based digital preservation platform the Archives centralized preservation, automated website harvesting, and delivered a customizable public access portal with standards‑based APIs to share metadata with aggregators like the DPLA. As a result, Boston’s records are more discoverable nationally, staff can track usage to guide digitization priorities, onsite research visits have increased, and the team has reduced time spent on server maintenance and disparate tools.

Boston City Archives

Marta Crilly

Archivist