World Day for Audiovisual Heritage Releases

In celebration of World Day for Audiovisual Heritage on October 27th, AVPreserve is releasing several new or updated white papers that provide guidance on the preservation and management of audiovisual and digital media collections. To start, we have translated five of our white papers into Spanish in order to increase accessibility for a global audience. These first five papers cover processing of AV collections, preservation of optical media, cloud storage for archives, disaster recovery, and an introduction to Codecs. We hope to continue translating our resources and look to feedback on our efforts and future requests. The Spanish language papers can be downloaded for free at https://www.avpreserve.com/papers-and-presentations/documento-tecnico-de-lengua-espanola/

Second, given the increasing ingest of born digital and digitized materials in all archives, we are releasing introductory tutorials (for Mac and Windows) on the use of the Command Line Interface (CLI) for managing files in an archival environment. CLI is a necessary tool for ingest, processing, storage, and monitoring of file-based collections, and the growth of almost all archives to include digital collections will require an understanding of how to use CLI and CLI-based software for collection care. The tutorials can be downloaded for free at https://www.avpreserve.com/papers-and-presentations/an-introduction-to-using-the-command-line-interface-to-work-with-files-and-directories/. In the coming months we will also be releasing a series of web tutorials on the use of various free and open source applications for digital collection care, similar to our web tutorial on ExifTool, a powerful application for reviewing and editing embedded metadata in digital files https://www.avpreserve.com/exiftool-tutorial-series/.

Also be sure to check out Chris Lacinak’s recent keynote presentation on our Cost of Inaction Calculator from last week’s Fédération Internationale des Archives de Télévision / The International Federation of Television Archives (FIAT/IFTA) World Conference. The COI Calculator is a planning tool that provides estimated budgets and schedules over the longterm so that one can begin to develop a preservation plan for beyond the immediate near term. By looking at the costs of physical storage and management, digitization, and digital storage, an institution can think about distributing costs over time while also considering the critical need for sustainability of preservation activities (and their associated costs) beyond short term fund raising or grants. Happy World Day, everyone!