Case Study: The University of Manchester Library secures long-term digital preservation and wider access to rare collections with Preservica

Bringing the past into the present at the University of Manchester Library

The University of Manchester Library, one of the UK’s five National Research Libraries, cares for millions of items across rare books, medieval manuscripts, maps, papyrus fragments and digital resources. Many objects are delicate or stored in diverse formats (including 250,000 publisher emails), so the library faced the challenge of digitizing, preserving and making this complex, fragile collection reliably accessible to researchers and the public.

The library implemented Preservica’s Enterprise cloud platform, using Preservica’s Bulk Upload service with AWS Import/Export Snowball and APIs to ingest and integrate roughly 30TB of digitized and born-digital content into a single backend for discovery applications. The result is consolidated, long‑term digital preservation, improved search-based access (notably for Middle Eastern and Iranian studies collections), and a scalable workflow for ongoing digitization.

The University of Manchester Library

Andy Land

Digital Programmes Manager