Archival Collection Services

Consultation | Accession | 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; whether a turnkey solution is required or just a selection of individual services. We consult on corporate, museum or heritage archive management, archival services, and collection management.

Accessioning is a decision process of the consideration to add new assets to a collection, and the subsequent acquisition and processing of new assets. Not all assets, such as duplicates or assets with ownership changes, are worthy of retention. Likewise, We find that a de-accessioning process helps streamline your collection, increasing the collection’s return on investment.

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.

Indexing | Taxonomy | Metadata | Cataloging

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. Arrangement is determined, in consultation with client stakeholders and may be sequenced or grouped by housing, format, age, frequency of use, subject and the classes of metadata.

Indexing and Taxonomy are developed based on industry classification standards for historical archiving, commercial or compnay-specific product hierarchies. Collection support and maintenance require 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. Often, research is conducted as part of examination of assets. Metadata application is a process of viewing and evaluating an asset, physical or digital, while assigning descriptive, technical and administrative metadata including controlled vocabulary or keywords for locating it in the physical collection, or for searching a repository such as a DAM system. Advising is provided for ongoing adjustments to metadata as new objects are accessioned, and new terms or themes come into use.

Collection Lifecycle | Fulfillment | Governance

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. The discoverability and accessibility enabled by our proven collection management provides the owner monetization of their assets through the entire life cycle.

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.