The team at Iron Mountain’s Media & Archival Services division catalogs and preserves some of the best-known archives in the world—films, recordings, artwork, physical items and far more—and overseeing the professionals that care for those collections is no simple task. It requires someone who understands not only managing people but also the value and critical nature of archiving itself—and that person is Andrea Kalas, vice president, Iron Mountain Media and Archival Services.
Having started out in film preservation, conservation and restoration at Paramount Pictures and the British Film Institute, Kalas sees herself as the archivists’ advocate, extolling the passion and determination that her teams bring to their work: “They understand both the rigor of managing collections with accuracy and care, as well as why it’s important. That dual perspective is something I carry with me every day. It helps me champion the value of preservation within Iron Mountain and ensures our organization never loses sight of the human, cultural and creative impact behind the assets we protect. My background gives me the empathy to understand what archivists need and the responsibility to make sure their work, and the stories it preserves, has the support it deserves.”
While Iron Mountain has carefully preserved aging media for years, its methods have changed over time. “While our core mission of preserving, protecting and enabling access to irreplaceable assets remains the same, the ways we execute this have expanded in important ways,” she explains.
In the past, many media companies treated their archives like attics full of half-forgotten bric-a-brac, but those days are long gone. “We’ve seen shifts driven by economic pressures and the evolving expectations of the film, music and media industries,” says Kalas. “Clients are increasingly focused on efficiency, long-term risk mitigation, and finding new ways to monetize and activate their archives. In response, Iron Mountain has broadened its services. Now we still safeguard physical and digital assets, but we also provide more sophisticated workflows, digitization capabilities, lifecycle management and discovery tools that help clients get more out of what they’ve stored with us.”
The need for discovery tools stems from one of the greatest challenges clients and archivists face: Just because something is protected in a box doesn’t mean someone knows it’s there. “Many archivists inherit boxes of materials that have never been inventoried, documented or even properly labeled,” says Kalas. Faced with sifting through countless items, Iron Mountain has developed custom AI-powered machinery like the Archive Explorer solution to ascertain and ingest metadata derived from tape boxes, film reels and the like.
Hand-in-hand with that is Iron Mountain InSight Digital Experience Platform (DXP). “For musicians and music companies, it offers a secure, centralized platform where digital audio, video, photos and other assets can be stored, managed and accessed,” says Kalas. “Its intuitive interface, and the ability to layer on AI-powered search, auto-tagging and metadata enrichment means clients can finally organize their creative archives in a way that is both secure and highly usable.”
The result, she says, is that InSight DXP and Archive Explorer “uncover hidden value within archives, enabling clients to find, monetize and activate assets they didn’t even know they had.”
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While Iron Mountain’s Media & Archival Services business has traditionally served music, film, broadcast and sports in the U.S., it’s now seeing growing international demand from the education and corporate sectors, including historic brands that want to preserve and protect their legacies for use in celebrating company anniversaries or other key milestones.
Another major change has been the division’s growing number of locations. While best-known for its legendary Boyers, Penn., facility, located 220 feet underground in a former limestone mine, it also has facilities based in Nashville; Hollywood; Moonachie, N.J., serving the New York region; Seattle; and London. The company’s Nashville facility was recently expanded to create new, temperature-controlled private vaults. “These spaces are ideal for Music City’s creative community,” Kalas explains, “providing secure, climate-appropriate storage for rare and special musical instruments, vintage pro-audio gear, tour wardrobe, production sets and other high-value materials requiring specialized care.”
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It’s all indicative of a company intent on looking forward, even as it preserves the past. “My role isn’t to tell our engineers or archivists how to improve— they’re already the best at what they do,” says Kalas. “Instead, it’s to amplify the importance of their work and show, through these partnerships, how essential preservation is to our global cultural community—and how we can support it.”