New York’s Museum of Modern Art deploys Arkivum/OnSite

With approximately 35,000 pieces of all MoMA artworks in some form of audio-visual (AV) format, including 500 hours of Andy Warhol’s 16 mm films, MoMA faced the challenge of digitally preserving all of this artwork and making it discoverable, accessible and available for the long-term.

Digitising AV artworks is in itself challenging as it produces relatively small numbers of very large files, and this was a key consideration for any preservation systems that MoMA selected.

Additionally, MoMA required whatever system it chose to be economically viable and remain financially sustainable as its data volumes increased. The museum also needed very high levels of data integrity, information security, quality of meta data, file format preservation and future proofing to be applied to its culturally and historically significant AV collections.

The solution also needed to provide significantly higher levels of end-to-end digital preservation best practice as defined by the US National Digital Stewardship Alliance than MoMA was previously using as well as to deliver a much easier process for accessing the AV artworks.

Taking this all into consideration, MoMA selected and designed a system around the already available integration between the Archivematica file-format preservation system and Arkivum’s data archiving service. The solution MoMA chose is the Arkivum/OnSite solution, as it delivers flexible on-site digital data storage, combined with a local instance of Arkivum/100 which, in turn, comprises an on-site Arkivum Service appliance that includes a multi-terrabyte local hard drive cache and an IBM LTO tape library for long-term data storage.

The integrated Archivematica/Arkivum solution has been combined with an in-house designed but open source Binder Indexing system which is expected to enable MoMA to handle 5.4 petabytes of digitised audio-visual art that will be generated over the next 10 years.

The newly combined system is located in the MoMA Data centre in New York and the entire system and its data is duplicated in another MoMA data centre for disaster recovery. A third copy of the tape-based data is stored offline at yet another MoMA location. This entire tape duplication process is managed by the Arkivum Service and provides the Arkivum 100% data integrity guarantee.

“We’re delighted that MoMA chose our solution”, said Jim Cook, CEO at Arkivum. “Having now reached the highest level of National Digital Stewardship Alliance best practice standards with our solution combined with Archivematica and the Binder system, MoMA has now significantly raised its standards for digital preservation and can be confident about its long-term data storage requirements.”