Universal | Digital Preservation & Consultation Services
By focusing on honest and direct communication with all clients, as well as innovation and integrity, we look forward to the collaboration and being an extension of your team. Watch our overview video!
Know Your History. Digitize | Discover | Engage
At Universal, we manage all of the components to deliver a fully accessible, digital format — giving underutilized historical documents a new opportunity for enjoyment and engagement for our clients. Our chain of custody system, secure facility, and professional production engineers ensure that your valuable history is safely preserved for the future in a relevant and usable format. Offering more than a digital transfer service, Universal provides the expertise and handling that your archival documents deserve. Our mission is to collaborate with organizations in order to digitize your legacy, discover new value, and engage your audience through accessibility.
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Objective
Building upon your desired goals, we work to deliver results that exceed your expectations and enhance your organization’s legacy. We want to build a partnership and be an extension of your team. This is where we have a managed process in place with fully defined objectives/milestones, allowing you to maximize the return on your preservation investment.
Project Scope
Next, we evaluate the assets you have identified for digital preservation and prepare a statement of work that specifically itemizes your costs and provides a timeline for completion.
Secure Handling
In most cases, the documents you have archived would not have been saved if they did not represent some value to your organization. Universal understands this and has created a secure chain of custody to transfer your valuable assets to our secure facility for processing. Once on site, all projects are staged within our humidity-controlled environment and are immediately audited into production. Your assets are stored in accordance with guidelines established by the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP).
Quality Transfer
In the end, results matter. For this reason, Universal has established a level of quality that exceeds current industry standards. Our best-in-class equipment has been set up and optimized by industry veterans with a minimum of 30 years experience on the equipment needed to process your project. Our combination of equipment, talent, and devotion to perfection ensures that each image and file is the best it can be. We won’t change your documents, but we will restore them to the best possible digital rendition.
Preservation
Once your project is completed, we provide the results to you in a format that is most easily used within your organization. Making your historic assets live again, rather than languish in storage, is our passion.
Before and After: Sample files of digitally restored film
Color cartoon
B/W automobile race
Cost & Timing of Digital Preservation
Before we begin any project, we work with each client to determine their objectives and the scope of need. From this needs assessment, we develop a statement of work that spells out all known costs so that our clients know exactly how digital preservation fits within their budget.
Whether funding from grants, donations, or as a budgetary item, our team works to ensure that the processing cost remains within expectations. The scope of the project also lets us estimate how much time will be needed to turn your project around. Since we only work with institutions, not consumer projects, we’re able to stage our projects so as to deliver each project on time.
We are here to help you bring life and value back to your history. Documentation from the past has an invaluable place in the future, and making that history relevant again is possible through Universal Information Services. Proper handling and digitization, with the right people, is what matters. Our 100-plus years of serving clients in the information industry uniquely positions us to help with your digital preservation needs.
