PROCAT Digital Service Rebuild

PROCAT is a bespoke service which was commissioned by The National Archives (TNA) in 1999\2000. It was built to catalogue public records, to provide an end-to-end service for both staff involved in cataloguing records, and for the public searching TNA's online catalogue via our public website. A service (SAR) controlling access based on PRA principles, was added soon afterwards.

Although the public catalogue access is now supplied by the Discovery service, PROCAT and SAR are still in use every day for preparing descriptions of newly accessioned paper records and revising descriptions and access to existing TNA paper records. ("Paper" here stands for any records not born-digital).

The service is built with components (web pages, search engine, SQL database and batch processes) of that era which have lasted well. However, many elements are now obsolete and are increasingly incompatible with any modern servers used to provide the service.

TNA has already commissioned a discovery process to detail the problem areas and outline a route to a transitional architecture which will partly replace those obsolete components. The aim is to provide a stable service prior to complete replacement. This avoids both the risks inherent in a "big bang" complete replacement project and maintains the service while other elements of the successor architecture are defined.

TNA now wishes to identify a delivery partner to deliver the transitional architecture. In summary these are:

Improve data ingest for large scale data loads ("accessioning") and large-scale access control ("change Open\Closed status")

Replace Active X based activation of an XML editing tool for markup

Replace an obsolete search engine used for detailed search of the existing catalogue by inhouse ("TNA staff") users