UNESCO has declared October 27 to be World Day for Audiovisual Heritage. (It also happens to be my birthday.)
For AV Heritage Day, the National Library of Serbia has produced a video about their recent efforts to digitize an important collection of very old sound recordings. Very cool.
My last job (a graduate assistantship in the linguistics department) and my current job (digital media specialist at a university library) are/were both really focused on preserving audiovisual heritage in some way. In the linguistics department I was digitizing reel-to-reel and cassette tapes that held audio recordings from linguistic fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Taiwan, Fiji, and other places in the Pacific. Some of these were from as far back as the sixties, and many of them were in pretty bad condition. After digitization, they were deposited in either the Kaipuleohone Digital Ethnographic Archive at UH (with the actual files stored in Scholarspace or in PARADISEC, a digital archive in Australia.
Now I’m working more on the video side of things. There’s an ongoing project here at the library to convert videos in obsolete formats (Beta, U-Matic, VHS*, and even a few films) to digital form. We’re already reformatted nearly 300 videos (over 250 hours of footage) and are working to make it accessible via a streaming server that will require authentication with a UH username. It’s been an interesting project so far and I’m really enjoying the chance to watch bits of pieces of the old – and usually fascinating – videos.
*We’ll save the arguments over whether VHS is obsolete yet or not for another day.
