PRESERVATION NEWS
C&RL News, February 2008
Vol. 69, No.2
by Jane Hedberg
Film preservation guide
The Society of American Archivists (SAA) has published Film Preservation: Competing Definitions of Value, Use, and Practice. In this 296-page soft cover book, Karen Gracy offers an ethnographic study of film archiving and preservation in the United States. She examines the history, economics, cultural context, and evolution of the field, providing a context for understanding preservation of this relatively new popular art form.
The book costs $56 for nonmembers or $40 for members, and is available from SAA, 527 S. Wells St., 5th Floor, Chicago, IL 60607; phone: (312) 922-0140; fax: (312) 347-1452; URL: www.archivists.org/catalog/pubDetail.asp?objectID=2146.
Sound Directions
Indiana University and Harvard University announce the release of Sound Directions: Best Practices for Audio Preservation. The result of a two-year project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Sound Directions identifies many best practices for digitization of audio media and examines existing and emerging standards. It contains chapters about the project, personnel and equipment for preservation transfer, digital files, metadata, storage, preservation packages and interchange, and systems and workflows. Each chapter has two parts, the first an overview intended for a general audience and the second recommended technical practices intended for audio engineers and digital librarians.
The 168-page report is available as a free PDF at www.dlib.indiana.edu/projects/sounddirections/papersPresent/sd_bp_07.pdf. For more information about the project, go to www.dlib.indiana.edu/projects/sounddirections/index.shtml.
Guide to digitization of film
Folkstreams.net, a Web site devoted to documentary films about American folk culture made by amateur filmmakers, has published Guide to Best Practices in Film Digitization, by Heather Barnes of the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. The Guide describes in detail how Folkstreams converted 16mm film and video tape into digital files for upload to its Web site. It also covers discovery, acquisition and selection of films for digitization, digitization issues and workflows, Web stream creation, Web site infrastructure and site development, metadata, preservation, advertising, and outreach. This project is of particular interest because the films are still in copyright and the guide contains a section about rights and obtaining permissions.
The guide is available free-of-charge at www.folkstreams.net/bpg/index.html.
CALIPR audio visual survey
The California Preservation Program has surveyed the preservation needs of moving image and recorded sound collections in the state. Thirty-two repositories containing approximately 1 million recordings participated. It used a survey instrument adapted from CALIPR, an instrument for surveying paper-based collections developed at the University of California-Berkeley in the early 1990s. Although the data are representative only of the institutions surveyed, the results do provide some indication of the scale of the preservation challenge. Seventy-two percent of the items surveyed are important enough to be replaced if damaged or lost, 57 percent have historical value, 9 percent have observable damage, and 32 percent are uncataloged.
The final report is available free-of-charge at calpreservation.org/management/cppav/CPPAV_finalreport_14oct07.pdf. CALIPR is available free-of-charge at sunsite3.berkeley.edu/CALIPR/introduction.html.
Jane Hedberg is preservation program officer at Harvard University Library, e-mail: jane_hedberg@harvard.edu; fax: (617) 496-8344