HMCTS Legacy Archive Recovery and Digitisation

The Ministry of Justice, through His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS), is undertaking preliminary market engagement to support consideration of a potential legacy archive recovery and digitisation requirement relating to historic index records currently held on obsolete media. HMCTS holds a substantial archive of historic index records, primarily across microfiche and cassette media. The current estimated scope includes approximately 20,000 microfiche sheets containing around 2 million records, and 658 cassette media units containing around 6.5 million records. The total estimated archive is therefore approximately 8.5 million records. There are also historic records held in books, although these are currently considered lower volume and lower priority than the microfiche and cassette records. The current arrangements rely on legacy physical and digital media, manual search activity, local operational knowledge and ageing technology. This creates challenges around retrieval speed, consistency, resilience, future access, preservation and the continued availability of the underlying information. HMCTS is therefore exploring market capability that could support the controlled recovery, digitisation, extraction, validation, indexing and searchability of these historic records. The purpose of this Request for Information (RFI) is to improve HMCTS’ understanding of market capability relating to: • inventory, cataloguing and condition assessment of microfiche and cassette media; • technical discovery of cassette formats, data structures, hardware or software dependencies and recoverability; • high-resolution microfiche digitisation; • recovery and extraction of data from cassette media; • image enhancement, OCR, intelligent data extraction and confidence scoring; • creation of a common target data model across recovered and digitised records; • validation, de-duplication, exception handling and quality assurance; • secure repository and search capability, inc