Archive digitisation: Move it or lose it
Organisations with large audiovisual archives are facing the challenge or digitising their libraries, or risk missing out on business opportunities or even losing their collections forever. In this article, DAMsmart! Business manager Adam Hodgkinson analyses the challenges facing large audiovisual collections.
Digital television, smart phones, laptops, netbooks, web radio – there are now so many ways in which people access audiovisual material that in recent years the demand for content has grown exponentially. While those organisations that have large audiovisual collections containing videotape, film and audiotape, should be well placed to capitalise on the seemingly insatiable demand for content, many such organisation have been hamstrung by having large sections, if not the entirety, of their archives confined in ageing and deteriorating content carriers.
For the owners and managers of large collections, the questions of whether and how to convert their tape libraries into more accessible and maintainable digital formats have been plaguing them for many years. While not wanting to miss the opportunities that the recent digital explosion could afford them, taking the step to digitise large collections has been fraught with questions of economic and logistic viability, format choice, security and on-going digital management.
Along with the clear incentives that digitisation offers media owners and managers, there are substantial risks to carriers that undermine the safety of tape collections. For non-digital media, the coming years represent a make or break time, due mainly to the combination of the physical degradation of carriers and the rapid decline in the availability of many previously standard media players. Audiovisual media is fragile and all tape will ultimately perish. UNESCO recently reported that an estimated 200 million hours of audiovisual media is at risk of loss due to degradation of the carriers. Audiovisual formats require particular climate controlled environments for storage to optimise the life of the carrier, however, this is costly and ultimately tapes will still require migration to a new carrier or format to avoid content loss. Working out which of the carriers are most at risk and prioritising accordingly can mitigate further loss when a digitisation project gets underway.
IDENTIFYING YOUR REASONS
Until recently, the lack of an economically and logistically viable means of achieving large-scale digitisation projects has been a frustration for many organisations and has restricted them from taking
the plunge. The emergence of new media migration technologies and specialist digitisation organisations has, for the first time, offered a feasible solution to digitise large amounts of video, film and audio.
Governments, both in Australia and abroad, have been among the first to seize this new opportunity to migrate their substantial collections. Once such example is the recent appointment by the Department of Parliamentary Services of DAMsmart, Australia’s pre-eminent specialist digitisation provider, to migrate more than 50,000 hours of video and is one of the largest outsourced digitisation projects in the world.
While a new era in superior migration technologies and specialist digitisation services is dawning, organisations that have yet to take the leap into the digitisation of their collections must navigate through some important considerations and choose their service provider wisely, in order to avoid any costly mistakes. Investing some time analysing the current scope and status of a collection, as well as its future potential, will greatly assist any collection manager to take the first step to successfully protect and emancipate their content for the future.
For any organisation that has a large audiovisual collection and is considering moving some or all of it to a digital format, one first key step is to clearly think through and delineate the reasons why digitisation is right for that particular collection. There may be many reasons why an organisation might embark on a digitisation project; these reasons can all be broadly grouped into three key drivers– access, commercialisation and preservation.
While these are not mutually exclusive, it is important for the organisation to understand and prioritise them. For example digitising to commercialise your collection will result in file
requirements widely different to a preservation objective. Defining the drivers of a digitisation project underpins successful and cost-effective management of the media and can assist in maximising the value of the audiovisual assets for an organisation.