Archival Collection Services

Consultation | Curation

Consultation Beginning with an exchange of ideas, Allied Vaughn engages in strategic conversation to understand your project goals and requirements. We bring our technical expertise in content including audio, video, motion pictures and documents, to define and scope your physical media project with a customized workflow solution. Our service is designed flexibly to fit your goals and budget. We consult on corporate, museum or heritage archive management, and collection management.

Curation is the application of a set of rules used to evaluate and prioritize physical assets to be made available in a collection. We help to develop your collection’s curation policy that encompasses not only the physical assets, but the legal right to own, use, and manage the assets. Through accessioning we apply curation policy to new assets.

Accessibility and Discoverability

The physical arrangement of assets in a curated collection is the foundation of classification and discoverability to be located, retrieved, used and returned for its owners.

Indexing and Taxonomy are developed based on industry classification standards for historical archiving, commercial or compnay-specific product hierarchies. We provide ongoing service to ensure new terminology is added to the index or taxonomy classification.

Cataloging and Metadata application are services provided by Allied Vaughn’s Certified Archivists, Librarians and Information professionals. Metadata application is a process of evaluating an asset, physical or digital, while assigning descriptive and administrative metadata including controlled vocabulary for locating it in the physical collection or system repository like DAM. Advising is provided for ongoing adjustments to metadata as new objects are accessioned, and new terms or themes come into use.

Collection Lifecycle Management

Allied Vaughn’s information professionals process and manage your assets throughout their life cycle from accessioning to use to weeding or de-accessioning from the collection. Content assessment is important to determining what assets are valuable and which are not. Assets are processed into the collection based on its classification within the index or taxonomy and when changes occur in ownership rights, they must then be removed and transferred to the new owner. The governance of the collection through its lifecycle ensures that fulfillment, monetization, use and re-use are customer service priorities. Discoverability and accessibility are enabled by our proven collection management that supports monetization of collection assets throughout the lifecycle.

Collection Archiving | Storage

Allied Vaughn’s archival services safely store collections of various sizes and requirements in either: Compact Storage, Vault, or Warehouse options, as appropriate for the nature of the collection. Our off-premises archival services support the long-term preservation of collections in temperature-controlled environments while providing access to the content, physically or digitally, for its owner. Allied Vaughn’s archival-quality storage extends the life of physical content for retention and preservation.