PrestoCentre Preservathon

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AV archives are facing a totally different challenge than paper-based libraries and archives. In many cases, there is a far more urgent reason to digitise now! Carriers of the recent past and, in particular, analogue video and audio tapes, are subject to serious decay within the coming years. The decay of electro-magnetic carriers is disastrous and irreversible and, depending on the content (that is, if we even know the content), extremely urgent. Here, digitisation equals preservation because the analogue original will fade away in one or two decades and will be lost forever.

Acetate film content and recent digital AV content have different challenges and seem more comparable to the situation in non-AV archives. For this content it is not the irreversible loss that counts, but rather the value to society to have access to a digital version of the content and the cost of storing the analogue original.

Most AV archives, however, have a blend of the above: high value content and technical vulnerable content. And it is their limited resources to fulfill their preservation mission that inspired the focus of this Preservathon.

More information.