Ask the Community

Hello! I signed up for a Starter account as a trial for my organization. We’re planning to upgrade to the Cloud Edition of Preservica, and I no longer need or want a Starter account.Does anyone know how to deactivate a Starter account? I have searched all over and cannot find this option. The Starter FAQ links to a form where you can ask to close your account, but it’s been over a week since I filled it out and I haven’t heard back.Thanks,Phil

I’m trying to upload a folder containing about 1500 (mostly) jpg files in various subfolders - total size approx 650mb - in the ‘upload a folder with metadata option’ but it fails.Unfortunately it doesn’t say why, just that I should try again. I tried again and it fails again.I tried a folder with only a few files in and it worked OKI have over 5GB left in my allowance.Is there a limit to the number of files that can be included in a bulk upload?

The way I’m “selling” Preservica Starter to my institutional stakeholders is to put a lot of cards up on the portal. I currently have 25 (yeah, I know, that’s a lot, but it’s currently a good strategy for me), but only 24 are displaying. I’m wondering if 24 if the limit because the latest card (the 25th) does not display. 

Hi everyone-When I follow the steps to bulk add metadata in my portal, I am given a message that this task requires Starter Plus after selecting “Bulk Add Metadata Template.”  My understanding was that Starter users would be able to utilize this tool. Has anyone else had this experience? Thanks!Ashley

Hi everyone.It’s been a while since we ingested anything into our Starter, but we’re in the process of moving over to a premium plan and decided to start “cleaning up” all of our files. We tried to ingest a folder (we tried a zip file) as well as individual files and each time the ingest failed OR it indicated it was successful, but no images appear. We’ve never had this happen before and any help would be appreciated!Thanks in advance.Robin 

I’m in the foothills of digital preservation (OK, base camp) and am not sure what to do about this one. Two days ago I uploaded some files, but they are still in the Preserving area so they don’t appear in the folder hierarchy on the left of the screen. Is this a common problem and is there a remedy? Is it because some of the files uploaded are in .vsd format?

Hi Everyone,I work in a municipal archives and am currently in the midst of a project to digitize all of our building plans, about 2000 of them.  Once uploaded into Preservica, I would like to make these files public but only to our building department.  They use the plans constantly and would benefit from the digital scans in the public portal.Is it possible to allow access to the collection but only to a small group of people?Thank you for your help!Ashley

Although I have tried numerous times to use the bulk metadata feature, I cannot figure out what I’m doing wrong. I follow the directions about setting up the function for a folder. I wait a day. Then I add one field as a bulk edit, then I wait one day for the changes to take effect, and they don’t. It leads me to wonder if the function has never been successful in setting itself up. It would be great to get some kind of notification so that I know if if the bulk editing function has correctly been set up. If it’s a background job, does it still run even if I log out of Preservica Starter?Also, this function only seems to be useful when you are finished adding assets to a folder, but I can’t be sure I’m ever finished. I realize I could run this function again at some point, but what if I want more than one field in said field. With Dublin Core, most fields are repeatable, so if I have a second or third subject, those other subjects will disappear. I find thinking about having

Hi all!Does anyone know what the character limit is for the Dublin Core Description Field? I tried adding a thesis abstract into that field but kept getting error messages. Once I cut it down to around 850 characters (including spaces) it finally accepted the content (abstract originally 1477 characters).Thanks!

Hi everyone-I am a new Preservica user and a newbie to digital preservation in general.  I’m pretty excited about this whole thing.  I read on the Preservica website (Secure Data Archiving & Electronic Solutions | Preservica  (scroll down a bit)) that you could use EAD as a metadata schema.  I don’t seem to see that as an option when I want to populate my metadata fields.  Has anyone seen this, too?Thanks so much for your help!Ashley Town ArchivistTown of Bedford, MA

Or any of the DC/MODS metadata fields values? Is this possible or will it be in the future? Date would make the most sense and be the most user friendly option for a lot of our materials (graduation photos, yearbooks, etc). It would also be useful to be able to sort by other fields besides title, like identifier, for example. 

I am having trouble deleting a photo that I uploaded yesterday just as the AWS went down. Does anyone have any idea how I would be able to delete it. Every time I try to delete it I get “Delete Request Failed.” Thank you! 

This may be a stupid question, but is there a way to change the order the folders display in the explorer?  They display in order of entry by default and there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to change the order.  Dragging and dropping didn’t seem to work unless I wanted to drop a folder into another folder.I know you can sort the assets within the folders with the sort buttons, but can you sort or re-order the folders/subfolders?Thanks.

Hi I have make the photo, video and the folder to be public. However, i could not make them appear in the public portal. Just wondering if I can get any advice please?

 Are you a  photographer, architect, marketing or design agency, a Law firm, society and using Starter? If so, I would like to hear from you and ask you a couple of simple questions.This will enable me to learn more about the ways in which you are using the product.Please contact me at Michaela.Heigl@preservica.com, and we can set up a brief zoom call.Thank you very much in advance!Kind regards,Michaela HeiglProduct Director, User Value

As more meetings being recorded and streamed to Youtube has anyone heard if Youtube integration is on Preservica’s development roadmap?

Hello, I am trying to determine how to change which asset displays in the view on the home page under the header Top Level Collections. I tried sorting according to different options but the same asset always displays.  I’d like to select another in its place.  Any suggestions?  Thank you very much.

Would anyone like participate in a survey to help Students at University College Dublin investigate how digital curators discover and utilize digital preservation tools? They have a short survey and have asked if we could invite the digital preservation community to participate.You can find out more about their work and take the survey here: http://surveymonkey.com/r/BFQ8W7QResearch Ethics Reference Number (HS-E-21-177-Cushing)Thank you in advance for your contributions.

Is it possible to assign a thumbnail to multiple assets at once? When I select more than one asset, the Assign Thumbnail option turns gray. I’m working on a collection with many .msg files and I’m wondering whether there’s a way to assign the same external thumbnail image to all of them without having to edit them one by one. If not, this might be a useful feature in a future update.

Hi! I am an MLIS student working on a group project for our finals and we are required to use Preservica for a preservation project. The Free account shows that we should have 5 gigs of storage, but even when my account is empty of assets, it shows I only have .21 gigs available. I recently uploaded 13 jpeg files and it says I have .01 gigs. Is this just a glitch or is there something wrong with my account?

Hi all:I’m currently working as a temp at a state university working on content for an upcoming digital repository, which will hold faculty and staff scholarship as well as some materials important to the history of the university. I am writing because I’m doing some research on how academic digital repositories handle sensitive content. Is that something anyone here has experience with? Or, do you have a guide you might suggest? I’m sure it will come up from time to time, but at the moment, I’m dealing with archiving all of the university’s yearbooks back to the 1920s. Unfortunately, the yearbook editors at times included some distasteful content that would be considered sexist and racist now. I’m trying to put together a process by which we can publish and maintain digital copies of items that are important to the university, but also be sensitive to its content and add some sort of warning to content that might upset a reader or viewer. I also want to put together some sor

Hi all,We have just received back a large volume of analogue audio recordings which we have been lucky enough to get digitised as part of the British Library Save our Sounds project.We are now thinking about the best way to ingest the outputs into Preservica (as well as get metadata into our Calm collection management system and link the digital assets to the catalogue record).I wondered if any other Preservica customers have been part of this BL project and would like to have a chat/ discussion about how best to structure and ingest the outputs into Preservica?As an example: Audio filesWe have a cassette tape which has been returned to us with two separate wav files, one for each side of the cassette.This is straightforward enough.Metadata filesHowever, for the above cassette, we have been provided with a three separate rows of spreadsheet metadata for the contents of this casset

Are you currently preserving or looking to preserve social media records? We would love to hear the what, why and how. Take our quick poll and share your comments below. To learn more about how you can ensure tweets can be read and trusted forever register here to join our next Tech Futures user meeting on Dec 02 2021.