Bodleian Electronic Archives and Manuscripts (BEAM) provides a trusted digital repository service for the management of born-digital archives and manuscripts acquired by the Special Collections department of the Bodleian Library. The repository allows archivists to gather, describe, manage and preserve the digital components in archive and manuscript collections while maintaining their relationship with more traditional components of the same collection.
For some time, the Bodleian has been receiving more and more 'born-digital' material in archive and manuscript collections. Digital material comes to us in a variety of forms - whole computers, computer disks and other types of external media. The files stored on these devices are encoded in a range of contemporary and older file formats. The types of material we typically expect to find include: audio, documents, email, images, presentations, spreadsheets and many more. Much of this material has no equivalent in paper form and must be preserved and accessed digitally.
