Business need: Optimize archive for critical legal and engineering purposes
When a Fortune 100 manufacturing firm faced a notable legal challenge, the company’s lawyers pulled negatives and other records from the corporate archive to help construct their defense, winning a multi-million dollar settlement.
A properly-maintained corporate archive is critical for navigating just these kind of situations, says the company’s archive manager. The archive is critical not only for defending against legal challenges and telling the company’s corporate history, but to support engineering teams that rely on historical information. For example, they access negatives and prints to see the cross-section of a product and analyze how a problem or challenge was met in the past. The data on each negative’s sleeve also paints a richer story for designers and technicians, allowing them to see things in a greater context.
Tasked with the goal of digitizing millions of these negatives, photographic stills and nitrate film within one of its US-based facilities, the manager used the initiative as a catalyst to categorize and organize the collection for business-critical use.
Business solution: Scanning and meta-tagging millions of media assets
Starting with digitization, the manufacturer initially relied on its communications and archival staff, but the project was more than they could handle. It required high-resolution scanning and tagging of millions of images and documents and then ingesting them into the company’s digital asset management (DAM) system. And because the archive also contains nitrate film, the manufacturer required nitrate film-handling capabilities, including shipping certification.
