Repsol's Spanish Industrial History and Heritage

Repsol is a Spanish multinational energy and petrochemical company performing worldwide upstream and downstream activities, holding on one of the largest documentary patrimonies of any industrial company in Spain.

Challenge

From the creation of CAMPSA in 1927 to the integration of different companies that gave rise in 1986 to REPSOL and, subsequently, in its operations in different countries with businesses and promotional activities. In total, a great and massive documentary heritage has been generated in different formats, including photographs, audio-visual content and more. As one of the largest industrial companies in Spain with more than 24 000 employees, there is a massive and quite complex documentation process for the Document and Library department.

As part of this project an immense wealth of informational patrimonies had already been catalogued and archived, but not long-term preserved. One of the main challenges with traditional digital storage mediums is that they cannot guarantee the secure and reliable conservation for information over longer time periods of decades and even centuries.The rate of technological evolution means that information must be moved to newer devices, platforms and mediums after just a few years. Overtime, this becomes expensive and risky, especially for static information that needs to be kept verifiably authentic.

Solution

Piql’s unique approach to long-term storage was a good fit for the historical data of Repsol. The time perspective for this historical content is perpetual. The fact that the history dates back almost 100 years is a good testament to the long-term time perspective the company has. As part of the project, Repsol had created a diary of social, sponsorship, management, communication and advertising activities, including the specialized kind of NODO films. This documentation goes back all the way to the inception of the original company in the previous century. Further, REPSOL had brought together and unified the different existing heritages, companies, areas, campaigns, making the patrimony much more complete.

Repsol chose Piql to safeguard and preserve some of the most important content of this collection. This included REPSOL’s advertising heritage with content used for advertisements campaigns since 1980 up until 2022.Formats would be a variation of documents in PDF format, images in different types and even advertising videos. As part of the project, it was decided that the information should be deposited into the Arctic World Archive, a unique initiative established by Piql to protect and document world memory.

With the deposit Repsol became one of the first industrial companies to store their historical patrimony and footprint in the vault in the Arctic. The process of preserving and storing the works of the industrial company with Piql technology was celebrated during a deposit ceremony in the Arctic World Archive.

Future

The objective of this project was to help the Documentation and Library department of REPSOL preserve their collections of company heritage spanning back more than almost 100 years and ensure it is securely stored to be accessible for future generations for another century.

The goal is to continue the partnership in storing more valuable and critical industrial documentation ensuring information compliance for years to come.