Archive Management and Digital Preservation System for Essex Record Office

Essex Record Office (ERO) is seeking market engagement to identify solutions for modernising its archive management, digital preservation, and public access services. This Preliminary Market Engagement (PME) exercise will inform future procurement and ensure solutions align with statutory responsibilities and long-term digital preservation ambitions. Key Requirements: ERO requires a comprehensive solution to replace its 25-year-old in-house Archive Management System (SEAX), which supports over 80% of operations. The solution must deliver: (1) Archive management capabilities including online and on-site catalogue access, subscription-based services, and payment processing; (2) Secure, scalable digital preservation for records with 100+ year retention periods, supporting multiple file formats including proprietary software and media files; (3) Achievement of National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) Level 4 maturity, including three copies across at least two UK/EU geographic locations, metadata standards compliance (METS, PREMIS, BagIt, Dublin Core), integrity checking, and access auditing; (4) Modern digital asset management and discovery capabilities; (5) Enhanced public access with intuitive interfaces, redaction capabilities, and access logging; (6) Scalability to manage current 88.8TB holdings (growing ~5TB annually) and support income-generating services; (7) Strong governance, security, and compliance features for statutory and regulatory requirements. Context: ERO has approximately 25 staff with up to 12 requiring system access. Current digital holdings comprise 3.3TB of born-digital records and 85.5TB of digitised collections stored on Microsoft Azure. Suppliers are invited to provide feedback on contract models, implementation timelines, delivery options (SaaS, cloud-hosted, hybrid), phased delivery possibilities, and scalability capabilities.