Creating a digital and physical corporate archive: Case study of a national restaurant chain

When faced with the very real prospect of losing as much as a half-century of company history and legacy documentation, a national restaurant chain decided that it was time to develop a corporate archive to preserve this important part of its culture. The task was not small. The company had to learn what it really meant to them to build an archive. Who would participate in contributing content? How would they capture digital content created in other systems? How would they track the use of artefacts in museum exhibitions? Getting the answers to these large questions was a matter of extensive business and technical requirements gathering that uncovered still more questions, such as whether they needed to develop formal records retention policies, and how they would handle the movement of physical artefacts into the archive from around the country. The answers to these questions were used to develop the business and technical requirements for a system of record for both physical and digital archival artefacts. A complete request for proposal, vendor selection and system demonstration process was undertaken to find the best-fit solution to track and preserve both digital and physical archival materials.