HSBC’s Global Digital Archive (GDA) is an ‘online vault’ and type of DAM that preserves and provides access to the Global Archives catalogue, spanning over 177,000 digital files and more than 200,000 catalogue entries across all regions.
Following the 2023 move to a new DAM platform, the Digital Archives team has continued to improve usability and efficiency for day-to-day archival work by deploying sophisticated Python scripts that, behind the scenes, automate high-volume, repetitive tasks.
Describing:
- How automation is being used as a practical “secret weapon” to simplify workflows and deliver measurable time savings across the HSBC Global Archives team.
- Three core use cases:
- Bulk ingest of digital assets, enabling large batches of files to be uploaded directly into the correct area of our DAM (e.g., ~42 hours saved in a single day when ingesting 420 files).
- Bulk creation and editing of catalogue metadata via spreadsheet-driven updates (e.g., ~125 hours saved in 2025 through ~2,500 new entries).
- Implementation of a new custom metadata fragment that harvests hierarchical context and makes it viewable and searchable – improving discovery in search results where ISAD(G)-aligned titles may lack contextual detail.
Explaining:
- How targeted scripting can:
- Reduce manual effort.
- Improve search and retrieval.
- Help to do more with less
- How we free teams to focus on higher-value archival work.
- How we get our collections’ metadata in shape prior to evaluating AI discovery and interpretation use cases for archival metadata.