Over the months we’ve been working with our Regional Media Legacies (RML) site partners, the RML team has encountered more analog audiovisual collections than digital collections. Analog materials include formats like 16mm films, VHS videotapes, and compact audio cassettes, all representing content created many years ago (in one case, one film from as early as 1915!). This focus on analog materials is unsurprising for us: our site partners are primarily historical societies with collections from the mid to late 20th century or earlier, and digital media wasn’t widely adopted until the mid-2000s.
What this means is that all of our site partners have a shared need to migrate their analog collection materials to a digital media format to ensure their longevity. This migration practice is widely known as “digitization,” and is a common archival practice where transfers of analog materials are made in a digital format that can be preserved, accessed, and distributed. Digitization is just one part of the larger process of collection management (how we handle collections, preserve them, and prepare them for access), and works in tandem with digital preservation planning.
Digitization is important for analog media because of two primary concerns: obsolescence and degradation. Obsolescence refers to the fact that legacy audiovisual formats (16mm film, VHS videotape, etc.) always need a media player (like a projector or a VCR) in order to view the content they carry. As time passes and players are phased out of production, they become increasingly difficult to find, making it difficult to play back their associated media formats. Degradation refers to the fact that media items are vulnerable to chemical degradation, particularly when they’re not kept in climate-controlled environments.
Creating digital copies of analog media stabilizes content and brings audiovisual collections into the present. While some films and tapes may still be able to be played back on their original media, the creation of a digital transfers ensures that contemporary media players (like Quicktime, VLC Media Player, or Windows Media Player) can play back the content, and additionally provides a copy that can be made accessible to researchers or other community members without damaging the original films and tapes.
While the incentive to digitize audiovisual collection is clear, the process of digitization itself can be complex and expensive. A lack of budget is a major deterrent to any long-term preservation project, and the expense of digitization is a major barrier to preserving audiovisual collections. It makes sense that digitization is expensive: the process of digitization is a specialized skill, particularly when making high-quality digital copies (often referred to as “masters” or “preservation copies”) that can be used to make a variety of access copies (lower-quality or compressed digital files, including files that can be uploaded to platforms like YouTube).
While limited budgets are a major barrier, there are a few key strategies that can be used to ensure that your digitization project reaches its full potential, and can even pave the way for future digitization projects. Below, we outline a few strategies we’ve learned directly from working with our RML partners.
Tip #1: Create a storage plan before digitization
One of the most important parts of audiovisual archiving is providing a secure, long-term storage environment where digital files are kept. At a minimum, this means that you have a designated storage device (like an external hard drive or an internal hard drive of a reliable workstation) that is monitored by a staff member or volunteer where your new digital files can be saved. Even still, we encourage our RML site partners to strive for preservation-level storage.
Preservation-level digital storage at a minimum requires redundant backups; in other words, for every digital file you have, create one additional (ideally, two additional copies) of that file. At least one of these copies should additionally be stored in a different geographic location than the others, so if one set of files is damaged or lost, at least one copy will be safe. Files and the storage media (hard drives, etc.) they’re saved on can be impacted by a number of potential risks: natural disasters, device failure, and human error are three examples. With redundant backups and geographic separation, the potential for irreparable loss is immensely reduced.
Archival digitization is a necessary, if expensive, investment in your archival collections. Without creating a storage plan ahead of the digitization process, stewards risk losing access to that investment. Consulting with archivists to create a storage plan ahead of digitization is a key component of collections care, and is an important step toward preserving your collections for generations to come.
Tip #2: Choose a sample set of materials to digitize.
It’s logical to want to digitize a collection in its entirety. For some of our RML partners who only have 5-10 videotapes, this is a real possibility! Other RML partners have over 100, or even upwards of 10,000 items to digitize. These numbers represent a significant expense, and it can be discouraging to know how or where to begin.
One way to begin the process of digitizing your collections in a lower-cost way is to choose a sample set of materials that you’d like to prioritize for digitization. While choosing fewer items to digitize is an obvious way to reduce costs (fewer items = lower cost), it has incidental benefits, particularly for organizations that are just getting started with digitizing their collections.
First, the process of prioritizing particular items allows stewards to re-familiarize themselves with their audiovisual collections. While it may be time-consuming, the process of going through your collections item by item could allow you to remove items that you may not want to digitize (like commercial titles or duplicate copies), which will reduce your digitization budget in the long run.
Second, sending out a small set of items to digitize allows stewards to understand the digitization process on a smaller scale, both in terms of the steps involved and in terms of the deliverables received. Stewards may find that they have preferred methods of shipping or delivering items to vendors, or realize that timelines need to be articulated in a specific way. Stewards may also realize that they may or may not need access copies made for a variety of reasons. Might you need access copies that can be uploaded to YouTube, or that could be projected onto a large screen, or maybe you’re capable of creating your own access copies? Sometimes you won’t know what you need until you go through the digitization process for the first time, and doing so with fewer items means you learn those experiential lessons on a smaller scale.
Tip #3: Choose a vendor you trust.
Our third and final tip is to work with a vendor that you trust. The RML project currently oversees some small digitization projects with vendors we have vetted and trust, and some of our site partners have their own vendors they trust to perform strong digitization work. Generally speaking, if collection stewards are embarking on digitization projects on their own, we highly recommend calling potential vendors, asking questions, requesting estimates, and talking about timelines. Taking some time to get to know your vendor provides you with an opportunity to put your mind at ease as you send your archival materials off-site. Ideally, stewards are sending materials to vendors that they trust to handle historical materials with care and respect!
Even if you’re working on small-scale or one-time projects, digitization is often a years-long process. With that in mind, it’s important to work toward finding a vendor you can see yourself working with for years to come. Vendors can be great allies as stewards work toward preserving archival collections, particularly as obsolescence and degradation become more severe issues over the coming years, and as technology continues to evolve. Even still, technology aside, RML always recommends finding people to work with who you trust, whether they’re digitization vendors, conservators, volunteer catalogers, interns, or otherwise. Building trust in archival work is key to long-term preservation, and no technology is more important than that.