Wessex Archaeology unearths valuable content

The challenge of managing heritage at scale

Wessex Archaeology, one of the UK's largest heritage organisations, bears a unique responsibility: documenting sites that may never be excavated again. The tools they use include shovels, trowels, sieves, string, and flags, along with technology devices that help capture details for posterity — digital cameras, ground-penetrating radar, and magnetometers. And now, Intelligent Content Management.

When it comes to content, the data management challenges Wessex Archaeology faces are complex. Teams generate a wealth of highly valuable data through fieldwork and research. Because of the varied nature of archaeological work, that data is collected in a wide variety of both analog and digital formats. Teams need a system to record, store, and access all this unstructured data efficiently across the organization (which is global) — but also to ensure that the content is always secure and that individual project files are only available to the right stakeholders, whether those stakeholders are employees, external partners, or even future generations.

In other words, Wessex needed a content management solution that could unite diverse operations while maintaining the security and governance essential to the privacy of clients and regulatory bodies.

The big discovery: Box

The Wessex IT team discovered Box while exploring document management tools. Bennett says, “it quickly became the frontrunner because of the collaboration it offered, the metadata options, and the security and governance, which quickly set it apart from other options."

For an archaeology company, content security is paramount. These documents are often the only existing record of archaeological sites. Wessex Archaeology leverages Box as a critical security and governance solution to protect their irreplaceable archaeological documentation while enabling controlled collaboration. Box enables Wessex to maintain strict confidentiality with clients while fulfilling their charitable obligation to share heritage findings with the public.

Box's security framework is particularly crucial given the sensitive nature of the work, which includes negotiating land agreements and managing health and safety documents. Bennett specifically highlights Box's approach to AI security, noting that "Our AI model is not someone else's model that we're feeding data into. We own it; we're responsible for it," which allows his team to explore emerging technologies without exposing valuable historical data to external risks.

Transforming archaeological documentation

Box centralized Wessex’s previously siloed systems into one collaborative portal, positioning the team to experiment safely and securely with Box’s AI technology. The organisation is poised to take advantage of AI for administrative efficiency in particular: automating document generation, ensuring forms are correctly filled, extracting metadata from photographs and archaeological records.

While AI cannot replace archaeological expertise, Bennett envisions it saving significant time and effort by pre-populating data fields and reducing manual administrative tasks. Box’s metadata-extraction capabilities are especially valuable for archaeological work, where every photograph and document must be tagged correctly in order to be compliant with the Archaeological Data Service's regulations. "The problem with manual tagging is always time," Bennett notes. "Our specialists, our technicians, our archaeologists — their time is best spent doing what they love, not filling in a spreadsheet."

The implementation of Box's workflow automation, combined with Box Forms, has allowed Wessex to build what Bennett describes as "a front-end app, which allows us to get data in a consistent manner from our field teams, from our office staff, from anywhere, and transfer it into our system in a way that meets our clients' requirements."

Efficiency across time and distance

The impact has been transformative. Teams now collaborate seamlessly regardless of location, whether, as Bennett says, "out in a field in the rain, in the office in the warm, or on some sunny beach in the south of Australia."

Bennett envisions a future where "project finds and images uploaded into Box will trigger AI-powered metadata extraction to identify key insights."

This forward-thinking approach aligns with Wessex's core mission, which Bennett articulates: "Understanding our past is massively important for our future. The heart of our organisation is our vision, which is to uncover the past to help to build a better world."

A collaborative partnership

When asked to describe the Box  experience in one word, Bennett's response was telling: "Collaborative. Everything we've done with Box has been in collaboration. We've never been told no, we've always been told, ‘let me go and have a think.’ It's been a really good experience."

For an organisation dedicated to preserving the past for future generations, Box has proven to be the ideal partner — ensuring the archaeological record remains as enduring as the artifacts Wessex uncovers.

The key benefits of Box, in Bennet’s words:

• Unified access: "Being able to go to one place to find your documents instead of several is always great"
• Enhanced collaboration: Box reduces "the distance between our field teams and our office staff to make sure they're collaborating together in an effective, efficient manner"
• Future-ready security: The platform provides a safe environment to explore emerging technologies like AI while maintaining data security

The collaboration Box offered, the metadata options, and the security and governance quickly set it apart from other options.