HERITAGE & ARCHIVES
Digital archives for schools, colleges and universities
From old photographs and audio reels to school magazines and video footage, SocialArchive gives you one central place to store, organise, and bring your history to life. It’s searchable, secure and simple to use, whether you’re digitising 100 years of legacy or capturing memories from last week.
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Build a secure digital home for your history & heritage
Create a central, cloud-based archive with advanced search tools, metadata tagging, facial recognition and more! Easily manage your collection in one place. It’s safe, secure and accessible from anywhere.
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Customisable archiving that works your way
No two archives are the same, and SocialArchive doesn’t force you into a rigid structure. Whether you're working with decades of photos, a mix of formats or specific cataloguing needs, our platform adapts to you. Custom fields, flexible metadata and user-defined taxonomies, mean you only enter the details that matter to your institution.
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Encourage interaction and engagement
Let your community get involved by identifying faces, adding memories and contributing their own content. Comments, tags and user submissions, bring a participatory energy to your archive and help fill in the gaps to create a more complete history of your institution.
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Bring people and places to life
Use built-in video and audio capture tools to collect oral histories, alumni interviews and personal reflections. Create interactive virtual tours of key locations, layering in archival photos, videos and audio, for an immersive, meaningful way for your community to engage with the past.
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Control access and protect privacy
Manage permissions and visibility at every level, whether you're sharing across your school, with select individuals or with the public. Add watermarks without altering original files, restrict downloads and redact sensitive information (or respond to people removal requests), in just a few clicks. Protecting your people and your legacy has never been simpler.
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Support every team with one archive
Your archive isn’t just for preservation, it’s a powerful tool for engagement.
Repurpose stories, photos and videos, to support development, marketing, admissions and more. Quickly find and share the right content for social media, newsletters, print and digital displays. Use your heritage to build trust, inspire action and strengthen your institution’s story everywhere.
Your history is powerful. Now it’s time to use it.
Book a short demo here or alternatively send us a message using the form, to explore how SocialArchive helps you preserve what matters, while making it more accessible, engaging and useful, to your wider school community.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here are some of the most common things people ask us about our heritage and archives service.
Can’t see what you’re looking for? Get in touch, we’d love to help.
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The platform can support physical, digital, born-digital and audiovisual records, with new file types and format support being added all the time.
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Absolutely, but rather than being built to confirm to one single standard SocialArchive is completely customisable to your needs meaning you can store all the data you want, and nothing you don’t.
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Yes, SocialArchive has complete support for customisable hierarchies setup to your specific requirements.
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SocialArchive also supports custom workflows allowing you to manage accessioning, appraisal, deaccessioning or any other processes in the way you want to.
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The system can be configured to comply with any specific standards and best practices, but for many of our users this isn’t feasible due to their available resources, and the platform therefore doesn’t have to operate to these.
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Yes, SocialArchive is completely customisable to your needs meaning you can store all the data you want, and nothing you don’t.
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Yes, SocialArchive monitors and alerts specified users in the event of any anomalies.
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By identifying file formats SocialArchive is able to flag high risk formats to specified users allowing them to approve batch migrations. All migrations are tracked and original files are preserved alongside migrated versions should verification be required.
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SocialArchive has a unique user portal, bespoke and operable privately, publicly, or in a hybrid model, providing a one stop shop for users to view and search all published content in one place.
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SocialArchive is completely at your control, so at any time you can upload, download, or delete material from the archive, without the need to contact us. This can be done en masse or at an individual file level.
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The SocialArchive user portal allows for a more simplistic display of material, keeping specified archival data in the background but not displaying it to lay users. Choose what is accessible and by whom.
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Using SocialArchive archivists can publish facial recognition to allow users to not only find themselves but to identify others in material to help build a more complete history. Users can also add comments at the level of individual pieces of content to add detail to material and help fill in gaps in institutional knowledge. These elements are then supported by the option for users to record their own memories/experiences in video or audio format, and to digitally submit their own content to the archive for appraisal and possible inclusion.
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Yes, SocialArchive can accept data imports in a wide range of formats, either with direct import or handled via our delivery team.
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Whilst SocialArchive does not have a published API it can integrate with many other software platforms, and already supports integration with many major CRM systems and databases. Contact us for information if you’d like to discuss integration with a specific platform.
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SocialArchive has been designed to specifically cater for all potential audiences in a single platform, be they from a technical or non-technical audience.
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Full user training is provided as part of the system deployment process, documentation supporting all key actions is available to archive side users on demand.
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Absolutely, SocialArchive allows for an unlimited number of user groups to be created, ensuring we can always cater to the specific roles within your organisation.
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SocialArchive is a fully cloud-based platform, no local software is required to operate the platform.
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SocialArchive can be accessed from any modern internet browser with a reasonable internet connection.
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We have a team dedicated to keeping your information secure and testing for vulnerabilities. We continue to work on features to keep your information safe in addition to things like alerts when new devices and apps are linked to your account. All SocialArchive’s data handling infrastructure to hold your content is based in the U.K.
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SocialArchive’s helpdesk is operational 09:00 to 17:00 GMT/BST Monday to Friday, excluding English public holidays. Response times vary depending on the severity of the reported issue but start from a one-hour response time.
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New features are continually being added to the SocialArchive platform. Functional updates are usually applied once per month and should fixes be required these can be deployed immediately without impacting users operation of the system.
Explore our other solutions
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Alumni & Development
Grow and manage your alumni community while driving engagement and support.
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Community Management
Connect with every audience using personalised content, smart segmentation and a built-in CRM system designed for education.
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Marketing
Take a storytelling-first approach to your marketing. Create compelling content, repurpose archive assets and capture authentic stories.
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Careers
Create an on-demand careers library for your community. Collect and share career journeys, and showcase the diverse paths your students can follow.
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Admissions
Use interactive virtual tours and testimonials from students, parents and alumni, to help prospective families connect with your school’s story.
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