Media Preservation Introduction

This guide provides advice on navigating copyright law when it comes to preserving deteriorating commercial video collections. A confidence booster for librarians and archivists who wish to undertake preservation work but are unsure whether making copies for digitization would infringe on copyright law.

These guidelines are being released by IASA in two parts. The first edition covers the preservation of video on conventional carriers, such as analogue video tapes and some digital video cassettes. The second edition, which is currently a work in progress, will cover the preservation of digital file-based video formats.

"This handbook is intended to answer the questions of archivists, librarians, and others who have a collection of videotapes they wish to keep for many years. The guidelines offered touch briefly on each appropriate topic, but do not cover any topic in detail. (Refer to the appendix for sources of more detailed information.)"

Article by George Blood.

This is a self-paced online course created by Mike Casey, Director of Technical Operations for MDPI at Indiana University. "Participants will develop practical, hands-on (and ears-on!) capabilities in a number of areas including critical listening, embedding metadata, and quality control. If you work with archival audio in any setting, from a large sound archive to a small number of recordings in a manuscripts repository, this course will provide you with the tools to develop a sound preservation plan."

A seminal work on audio preservation: "This publication presents the results of research and development carried out by the Sound Directions project with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities in the U.S. Each chapter in this document is divided into two major parts: a preservation overview that summarizes key concepts for collection managers and curators, followed by a section intended for audio engineers, digital librarians, and other technical staff that presents recommended technical practices while summarizing our findings and experience."

Brief overview by the NFSA (National Film and Sound Archive of Australia) with a focus on preservation of household media collections.

"The guide aims to help public and private institutions, as well as individual collectors, that have sound recordings in their collections but lack the professional expertise in one or more areas to preserve them. The chapters that follow cover audio conservation and preservation, recorded sound formats and their associated risks, appraisal, related copyright issues, and disaster preparedness. The guide also offers advice on making informed decisions about digitization, as well as strategies for managing digital content. "

From the Executive Summary: "The National Recording Preservation Plan has been devised to provide a blueprint to “implement a comprehensive national sound recording preservation program,” as mandated in the National Recording Preservation Act of 2000. Congress specified that the program established by the Librarian of Congress under this legislation 'shall ... increase accessibility of sound recordings for educational purposes.' Preserved recordings can benefit the public only if they are made available for listening. Technological, institutional, and legal impediments to broadened access create daunting challenges for the national preservation effort. This plan identifies the audio field’s most important preservation and access problems and offers recommendations for surmounting them."

This publication provides guidance to audiovisual archivists on a professional approach to the handling and storage of physical audio and video objects.

"This report is a joint project of the Commission on Preservation and Access and the National Media Laboratory, developed within the Commission’s Preservation Science Research initiative. The initiative encourages new techniques and technologies to manage chemical deterioration in library and archival collections and to extend their useful life."

Suggests a minimum seven-step method for evaluating the condition of magnetic tape, along with comprehensive reference photographs and visual guides.

"Managing Digital Audiovisual Resources fills a gap as a single concise guide for real world basics, broad concepts, and practical needs from technologies to collections to promotion. The easy-to-read book is geared towards the ongoing management of digital audiovisual resources, presenting real world scenarios and ways to think through balancing all of the many factors and needs for these collections, dealing with limited resources, materials with different levels of significance, materials facing different levels of preservation risk, factors for decision making, and resources for other options. "