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, including access controls, audit logging and reporting;
• service transition, user guidance, business change and benefits tracking.

Through this RFI, HMCTS is seeking to better understand:

• available market capability and supplier capacity;
• how relevant services are normally delivered, for example through specialist digitisation services, legacy media recovery, data extraction, repository/search solutions, managed technical services, consultancy, integration support or mixed delivery models;
• indicative discovery, pilot, implementation and delivery approaches;
• potential commercial models, procurement routes and phasing options;
• legal, data protection, security, records management and information assurance considerations;
• indicative costs, cost drivers, timescales, dependencies and delivery risks;
• the extent to which existing storage, records management or archive services could support or influence a future delivery route.

This RFI is deliberately focused on market capability, technical feasibility and delivery evidence. HMCTS is not asking suppliers to design the future service or make policy, legal, retention, disposal or public access decisions at this stage. Any future capability would need to operate within appropriate HMCTS governance, records management, data protection, security, information assurance, auditability and access control arrangements. This RFI is an evidence-gathering activity only. It is not a request for a quotation, proposal or tender, and it should not be treated as a commitment to any future procurement. The issuing of this RFI does not commit HMCTS or MoJ to procure any services, software, data platforms or solutions; does not indicate any supplier preference; and does not create exclusivity or advantage for suppliers who respond. Responses will be used solely to inform HMCTS’ understanding of the market, possible future delivery options, recoverability of legacy media, business case development, affordability, assurance considerations, commercial strategy and potential next-stage routes.