The Associated Press leverages the Cloud for new digital preservation initiative

The Associated Press (AP) has begun a new collaboration with digital preservation specialist, Preservica, to future-proof its corporate records and unique news wires using Preservica’s digital preservation platform hosted in the AWS Cloud.

Established in 1846, AP is the essential global news network, delivering fast, unbiased news to all media platforms and formats. AP journalists work in 280 locations in more than 100 countries around the world.

In 2003, AP established its Corporate Archives under the direction of Valerie Komor. Over the past 13 years, Komor’s objective has been to create a system for acquiring, organizing, preserving and making accessible the organization’s historical records, which span 1848 to the present and include organizational and governance records, the personal papers of journalists, photographs, videos, and original wire copy. The Archives primarily serves AP journalists and staff, but it is open to outside researchers by appointment.

With the surge of “born-digital” records over the past two decades, the challenge of ensuring their long-term preservation and accessibility has become more complicated. To meet this challenge the Associated Press chose to use Preservica’s Cloud Edition, hosted on AWS, to safeguard their records and automate the technical burden of ensuring digital content remains readable and useable into the future by actively managing and migrating files to newer formats as old formats become obsolete.

The Associated Press has just completed ingesting into Preservica a full set of annual reports (1875--) as well as its complete collection of charters and bylaws (1895-2014). “We thought we would start by preserving those records that fully document AP’s business history,” commented Komor. “The first tranche of 2TB of data – TIFFs and PDFs – has now been successfully ingested into the system.”

AP is also digitizing and uploading collections of original wire copy, which are in demand by journalists and historians alike. These include the voluminous reporting on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. Some of these sheets feature the hurried pencil edits of the editor working as fast as possible to get the story out. “You can actually see the letters cascading down each page, evidence that the editor was pulling the paper out of the teletype while it was still printing,” explained Komor.

Preservica CEO Jon Tilbury added: “The Associated Press joins a growing number of forward-thinking corporations using Preservica in the Cloud to safeguard their vital digital records. AP has a valuable corporate history, as well as over a century and a half of news to protect. We feel very privileged to have Preservica chosen by AP.”