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 managerAdam 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.