A Canadian Museum Future-Proofs Over 75 TB of Prized Collections with Preservica and AWS

The Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 implemented Active Digital Preservation from Preservica to protect over 75 TB of diverse digital materials, safeguarding personal accounts of the country’s immigrant experiences and making them accessible now and in the future. The museum is Canada’s sixth national museum and is located at Pier 21 on the Halifax seaport, where nearly 1 million immigrants landed 1928–1971. The museum’s digital collections are protected by Preservica’s digital preservation platform that leverages Amazon S3 and Amazon S3 Glacier for durable, flexible, and cost-effective storage along with Amazon RDS for managed, highly secure, and scalable databases in the cloud.

The Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 is tasked with preserving and sharing Canada’s immigration stories by protecting unique materials that document firsthand accounts of Canadian immigrants and those who assisted them. These personal accounts are captured in audio files, videos, digital items, written documents, archival photographs, artifacts, and other formats that had been stored across the museum on hard drives and legacy systems.

The museum staff recognized that digital content is inherently fragile and at risk due to basic data corruption, storage media degradation, and file format and software obsolescence—among other factors. To protect all digitized and digital-born materials, the team needed to move files into one system where materials could be future-proofed to ensure accessibility for the long term, even as technology changes. “There is a misconception that digital preservation is backup,” says Heather Walker, collections coordinator at the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21. “It’s an approach to thinking long term—10, 20, or 30 years from now.”

“If you have content that you need to keep for longer than seven years, you’re likely going to have accessibility issues because of changes in technology, systems, or file formats,” says Katie Gambone, channel marketing and business development manager at Preservica, a leading provider of digital preservation technology and an AWS Partner.

The team at the museum advocated for a viable and sustainable solution to digital preservation, recognizing that their small IT and collections staff did not have sufficient resources to complete this work. Any new system would need to integrate well with the museum’s entire digital landscape while cost-efficiently meeting its high standards for security and data durability.

Preservica was selected to lead the migration to the firm’s Active Digital Preservation platform. This software solution—built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its flexibility, agility, and security—catalogs materials and automatically migrates files from obsolete formats to newer formats over time. This ensures the long-term usability and integrity of digital files, regardless of their original format. “The way our software automatically converts out-of-date formats into current, usable, and accessible formats—today and in the future—is important for true digital preservation,” says Gambone. “We can future-proof up to 2,300 different file formats—and that number continues to grow.”

The migration began with the creation of workflow processes to ensure that both the digital content and associated descriptive metadata could be ingested into Preservica’s platform efficiently. Digital content on the museum’s network was packaged and then streamed to the Active Digital Preservation platform, enabling the museum’s team to focus on curation and description rather than content uploads.

Many of the museum’s assets contain more than one file. For example, digital content may include original, high-quality audio, video, and image formats (referred to as “preservation files”) along with lower-resolution files or copies that load more quickly (referred to as “access files”). Collections with raw video and audio file formats also include sidecar files as part of the post-production assets. In Preservica, these related files are retained as a single asset, ensuring that they can be accessed and further curated for generations to come.

To deliver cost-efficiency, unmatched security, and long-term durability, Preservica leveraged AWS storage services. Frequently used files such as the access files are stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), giving the museum staff fast access with industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. The preservation files and other larger materials that are accessed less frequently are stored in Amazon S3 Glacier, which provides secure, durable, and lower-cost storage for data archiving.

The solution also uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for secure and resizable compute capacity for a variety of workloads, and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) makes it simple to set up and scale managed databases in the cloud.

With over 75 TB of data uploaded and tagged in Preservica, the museum now has a future-proof, searchable system with rich metadata attached to files, making materials easier to find today and in the future. “The system has made it much more efficient for our team to locate specific collections,” says Sarah Little, manager of collections and digital preservation at the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21.

The new system has given the team confidence in their ability to protect these historically significant materials for the long term. “Our collection is special and unique. It consists of people’s personal memories and experiences that speak to the story of their immigration journeys to Canada,” says Little. “It needs to be preserved.”