HMCTS Legacy Archive Recovery and Digitisation
Description: The Ministry of Justice, through His Majesty's Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS), is undertaking preliminary market engagement to support consideration of a potential legacy archive recovery and digitisation requirement relating to historic index records currently held on obsolete media. HMCTS holds a substantial archive of historic index records, primarily across microfiche and cassette media. The current estimated scope includes approximately 20,000 microfiche sheets containing around 2 million records, and 658 cassette media units containing around 6.5 million records. The total estimated archive is therefore approximately 8.5 million records. There are also historic records held in books, although these are currently considered lower volume and lower priority than the microfiche and cassette records. The current arrangements rely on legacy physical and digital media, manual search activity, local operational knowledge (read more...)
Summary: The Ministry of Justice, through His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS), is exploring recovery and digitisation of historic court and tribunal index records held on obsolete media. The archive includes microfiche and cassette records, with historic books a lower-priority source. The work under consideration spans inventory and condition assessment; technical discovery and data recovery; high-resolution scanning; image enhancement, optical character recognition and data extraction; validation, de-duplication and quality assurance; and creation of a shared data model. It may also require a secure searchable repository with access controls, audit logging and reporting, plus service transition, user guidance and business change. The purpose is to improve retrieval, consistency, resilience, preservation and future access. This is a single service requirement, with delivery associated with HMCTS in England; no specific delivery site is stated.