Disaster recovery of media archives

Abstract

The National Hockey League (NHL) archive encompasses the 99-year history of the league and the sport of hockey. It includes more than 200,000 assets, representing game footage, scanned scoresheets, letters and other communications from league and government officials, many millions of still images, many other digital assets, and many insights into the league's history. Having recently completed a project to digitise all of these assets in advance of the league's centennial season in autumn 2017, much of the reasoning behind the NHL's plans for recovering the archive in the event of a disaster is very fresh in its collective mind. This paper examines the solution-influencing technology trends, economics, important business requirements and asset growth and diversification expectations that drove the NHL's disaster recovery planning for its historical archive.