The National Archives (TNA) is planning a rebuild of its PROCAT digital service for cataloguing public records.
It has published a market notice in advance of tendering for a delivery partner, indicating the project could involve a spend of around £500,000.
PROCAT is a bespoke service dating back to 1999-2000, built to catalogue public records, support staff in the process and the public in searching TNA’s online catalogue through its website. An SAR service controlling access was added soon afterwards.
Although public access to the catalogue of records now goes through the Discovery service, PROCAT and SAR are still in use for preparing descriptions of newly accessioned paper records and revising descriptions and access to record. They include components that are now obsolete and increasingly incompatible with modern servers.
Reducing risk
TNA has already commissioned a discovery process to replace the components for a stable service before a complete replacement. The notice says this is to reduce the risk of a ‘big bang’ approach and maintain the service while other elements of a new architecture are defined.
It says the priorities for a delivery partner would be improve the ingest of large data loads and manage large scale access control, replace Active X based activation of an XML editing tool, and replace the obsolete search engine used by TNA staff.
The contract for the project is expected to run for two years from the beginning of September.
