Museum-Quality Comprehensive Collection Care
Monocurate provides comprehensive, end-to-end collection care for archival materials, works on paper, art, and obsolete media. Based in Austin, TX, we serve clients across the greater Austin area and throughout Texas. Our team of expert archivists specializes in organizing, preserving, and digitizing a wide variety of materials, including documents, drawings, maps, photographs, rare books, and small objects.
Archival project planning is intricate, requiring careful attention to the long-term preservation and accessibility of materials. At Monocurate, we don’t just execute tasks; we act as a strategic partner, offering expert insights and guidance throughout your project. Our work is rooted in non-discriminatory, unbiased practices, ensuring fairness and inclusivity in every aspect.
We are dedicated to tackling complex archival challenges with an agile and innovative approach. Monocurate has a proven track record of pushing the boundaries in archival work, resulting in enhanced teamwork, knowledge sharing, and successful project outcomes.
Known for our collaborative and flexible approach, we work closely with clients to understand their unique needs and constraints. We provide tailored solutions that align with your goals and resources, helping you prioritize actions based on the urgency and importance of preservation needs. This allows you to allocate resources effectively, addressing critical issues first—whether they involve preservation challenges, organizational inefficiencies, or risks posed by environmental factors.
Our focus on innovation equips our clients with the tools and expertise to tackle backlogs, reduce costs, and improve outcomes. This approach enhances your ability to preserve and share cultural heritage for future generations.
Through fostering collaboration and interdisciplinary strategies, Monocurate ensures that your collection is cared for with the utmost professionalism and dedication.
Key Advantages
- End-to-End Collection Care: Monocurate offers a mix of collection care solutions for building archives that help you discover, preserve, and share your history.
- Ongoing Support: We are dedicated to working alongside you every step of the way. Our commitment to collaborative success extends to everyone we serve—families, galleries, libraries, archives, and museums—ensuring that together we achieve meaningful and lasting results.
- Unparalleled Combination: We provide an unmatched blend of experienced archival staff, cutting-edge resources, a dedication to innovation, and a supportive environment free from the usual institutional bureaucracy and red tape.
- Efficient Workflows: Our streamlined process saves you both time and resources. We implement efficient processes to make archival projects smooth and manageable, allowing you to focus on what matters most—your collection.
- Expert Insight: Our team brings specialized expertise to every project, ensuring that your decisions are informed by deep knowledge of archival best practices. We help you make the right choices to preserve and manage your collection effectively.
- Security: Monocurate provides secure and insured services you can trust. We are committed to safeguarding your materials, giving you peace of mind that your collection is protected and handled with the utmost care.
- Compatibility: Our solutions are designed to integrate smoothly with existing content management systems (CMS) or digital asset management (DAM) platforms, making it easy to manage your collection without disruption. We ensure that the materials we process match your system’s requirements for seamless ingestion.
- Ethical and Impactful Research: At Monocurate, we believe in the importance of ethical and meaningful contributions to the field of archival work. Our interdisciplinary, collaborative approach promotes responsible research practices, making sure that every project we undertake has a positive, lasting impact.
- Proven Results: With a strong history of successful projects and satisfied clients, Monocurate stands by its results. We are proud to have helped numerous individuals and organizations preserve and share their stories, with outcomes that consistently exceed expectations.
Research and Development
Monocurate is committed to staying at the forefront of technological advancements in the archival field. We know how important it is to keep archival processes efficient and up-to-date. Our dedicated team works hard to improve processes related to traditional archival methods so that we can do more for our clients. By enhancing conventional archival workflows, we have redefined the archival process, setting a new standard for efficiency and effectiveness. Monocurate's focus on innovation means users benefit from streamlined processes, lower costs, and better results.
Working With Monocurate
Some of the details you need to know:
Insurance
Monocurate has active insurance policies, including Commercial General Liability and Professional Liability Insurance. Clients can request to be added as a certificate holder for the duration of their project lifecycle.
State of Texas
Monocurate holds active certification and registration for the Texas State-Wide HUB - Historically Underutilized Business in Texas, and CMBL - Centralized Master Bidders List.
City of Austin
Monocurate LLC is a City of Austin Registered Vendor.
State-of-the-Art Technology
Our professional archivists leverage specialized technology and equipment tailored explicitly for archival and preservation purposes. Our techniques safeguard your artifacts with unparalleled precision. By harnessing the latest advancements in technology, we ensure that your valuable collection receives the highest-quality care and protection it deserves.
Our approach allows us to track relationships between collection materials, collect crucial data points, automate collection information, and track provenance efficiently and affordably. This cost-effectiveness, combined with our ability to describe collections at the item level efficiently, ensures our clients get the most out of their investment. Our dedication to innovation ensures our clients enjoy streamlined processes, reduced costs, and improved outcomes, enhancing their ability to preserve and share cultural heritage for future generations.
Personalized Preservation Strategies
At Monocurate, we understand that each collection is unique, which is why we take a personalized approach to preservation. Our team works closely with you to evaluate your artifacts, clarify your goals, and develop a customized preservation plan that suits your project’s specific needs. We offer a variety of preservation solutions grounded in professional best practices. By working collaboratively, we ensure that archival storage is tailored to meet your exact requirements, ensuring the safety, stability, and accessibility of your collection.
Our dedication to customized storage solutions means that all work is done in-house using only museum- and archival-quality materials to guarantee a proper fit and protection for each item. This thorough, individualized approach ensures every artifact receives the care it needs. With Monocurate, your collection is protected for the future, ensuring its continued accessibility and enjoyment for generations to come.
Add-on Service: Collection Treatments for Digitization Prep
Over time, historical documents and works on paper can fade, degrade, or suffer physical damage. As part of Monocurate’s end-to-end collection care, we use advanced, reversible soft-conservation techniques to bring your paper materials back to life.
In cases of material loss and damage, our skilled preservation technicians carefully mend tears that seamlessly blend into the artifact, remove debris, and rejuvenate crumpled paper, preserving the integrity of each item while maintaining the piece's legibility and aesthetics. Our careful approach ensures that your collection is not only preserved but also ready for the best possible scan during the digitization process.
Digitization Overview
Archival digitization involves converting physical materials into digital formats with an emphasis on preservation and long-term accessibility. Unlike typical scanning, this process focuses on accuracy, the creation of descriptive metadata, and the careful handling of valuable or historical items to protect their integrity.
At Monocurate, we focus on delivering digital files that faithfully represent the most valuable and relevant items in your collection, ensuring that every important detail is preserved with precision and care for future use. We also prep all material before digitization. This includes removing fasteners, flattening creases and earmarks, ensuring attached material and sticky notes don’t obscure text, and separating duplicate or stuck-together material. This ensures that the digital files are high-quality and true to the originals, preserving what matters most to you.
We follow FADGI Technical Guidelines to ensure the highest standards in digitization. Using advanced curation methods, we create high-resolution, preservation-grade files, reducing the need for future re-digitization. Our "use-neutral" approach and strict adherence to archival standards ensure your materials are securely preserved and properly cataloged for long-term access.
We encourage clients to prioritize the items that matter most for digitization so they are not paying for materials they may not need. If you’re unsure where to start, we’re here to help. After evaluating your collection and discussing your priorities and goals, we’ll recommend the best items to focus on—whether that’s based on historical value, personal significance, or informational content. This ensures you don’t pay for unnecessary digitization costs. Plus, we never charge for blank backs or rescans and only bill for images received.
All projects are priced to include basic material prep, both preservation and access files, accurate, searchable file descriptions, an external device (thumb drive/hard drive), and a secure, shareable link.
Typical Digitization Specifications
Documents
- 300-400 dpi
- 24-bit depth, color
- TIFF preservation files
- PDF access copies
Photographs/Visual Material
- 600-4,000 dpi
- 24-bit depth, color
- TIFF preservation files
- JPEG access copies
Books Spreads
- 400 dpi
- 24-bit depth, color
- TIFF preservation files
- PDF access copies
