Access to film heritage in the digital era – Challenges and opportunities

Unlike archiving most other artifacts and objects, film preservation has always been heavily dependent on industry practice. The complicated and vast machinery involved in shooting, duplication, processing and projection of new films has been the same ones used for preserving and presenting film heritage. The recent shift from analogue to digital technology in capture, post-production and distribution of cinematographic works …

Cultural Heritage – Digitisation, online accessibility and digital preservation

This report reviews and assesses the overall progress achieved in the European Union in implementing Commission Recommendation of 27 October 2011 on the digitisation and online accessibility of cultural material and digital preservation (2011/711/EU), as well as the related Council Conclusions of 10 May 2012. The Commission presented a first report in 2008, with its Communication ‘Europe’s cultural heritage at …

AV Insider 4: Film, Files, Formats, and the Future

AV Insider is a quarterly magazine for the audiovisual digital preservation community. AV Insider issue 4 (December 2013) is themed “Film, Files, Formats, and the Future”. This issue covers technical guidelines and examples of good practice for film digitisation from both Memoriav (Switzerland) and the Institute for Sound and Vision (Netherlands). They have both looked at many options and have …

A Systemic Approach to the Preservation of Audio Documents: Methodology and Software Tools

This paper presents a methodology for the preservation of audio documents, the operational protocol that acts as the methodology, and an original open source software system that supports and automatises several tasks along the process. The methodology is presented in the light of the ethical debate that has been challenging the international archival community for the last thirty years. The …

The Safeguard of Audio Collections: A Computer Science Based Approach to Quality Control—The Case of the Sound Archive of the Arena di Verona

In the field of multimedia, very little attention is given to the activities involved in the preservation of audio documents. At the same time, more and more archives storing audio and video documents face the problem of obsolescing and degrading media, which could largely benefit from the instruments and the methodologies of research in multimedia. This paper presents the methodology …

Caring for Audiovisual Material (Webinar Recording)

Audiovisual collections can run the gamut of formats, from analog audio, film, and video to digital audio, film, video, and optical media. This five-part course examines the various formats and explores the major issues and challenges in preserving them. A team of national experts helps you to navigate the mind-boggling array of AV materials and provide practical advice on identifying, …