This blog is authored by Cassie Shaw, Lead Digital Archivist at RMIT University Archives.
The concept of stories as a hook to grab an audience has been a major advocacy tool for us at RMIT University Archives as we’ve worked on our Digital Preservation Strategy and Roadmap over the past three years. When we started engaging with our users across the university via interviews and focus groups, we used the line “What is the story you want to tell about RMIT in the future?” to draw them into sharing their aims of preserving what one respondent called the “blood, sweat and tears” of the achievements and the effort our community has put into making it a great place to learn and work.
This year at Archives we’ve been able to work on Saving Our Stories in a very literal sense. We have been storing a collection of audio-visual recordings from our student-run television production house, RMITV, which has produced content for both online platforms and Melbourne’s free-to-air community television platform, Channel 31, since 1987.
The collection includes legacy-format magnetic tapes such as U-Matic, VHS and MiniDV, as well as many optical discs and a few floppy disks to round it all out. We've been "temporarily looking after them" since 2018 and so as the Deadline 2025 alarms have rung ever louder, and the dangers to their long-term accessibility have increased, we made a successful case to have the collection digitised for long-term preservation. The boxes have been sent off to our chosen vendor and we hope to take receipt of the digital material in December.
There is a fantastic, eclectic mix of student film and documentary alongside very professionally produced programming that all form a valuable body of stories about our university, Melbourne and student life from the past few decades. Programs include student-produced current affairs shows such as “Newsline”, music clip shows like “Chartbusting 80s”, late-night talk shows, “Under Melbourne Tonight”, and both raw and edited footage from Uni Open Days and “Battle of the Bands” competitions. This forms a large and valuable body of insight into student perspectives and priorities; voices which are less commonly heard in our collections. The material offers both enrichment and counterpoint to the stories within our archive, which are often highly controlled and more compliance oriented.
We didn’t have access to playback hardware for any formats except the MiniDV tapes, and the risks of attempting to play back older formats like U-Matic on ill-maintained and potentially damaging equipment meant we were unable to confirm the contents of a lot of it. There are certain to be some surprises within! For years we have used an archived excerpt from a 1975 orientation-week programme promoting a performance by a then up-and-coming band named AC/DC as an advocacy tool – who knows what potential star power we might find in the tapes?
The element of serendipity of these stories making their way to us at Archives has led to an unexpected positive outcome from the process - developing a lasting relationship with the RMITV team. We have co-signed a Memorandum of Understanding with them to provide an ongoing service to look after their archival material where possible, both in hard copy and digital, while ensuring their ongoing rights to ownership. As an entity with a small budget, they are excited to be preserving and gaining access to a good chunk of their history, and we benefit from the learning journey of preserving a variety of formats and continue to build on our digital archiving capability.
We don’t yet hold much digital audio-visual material in our collections, so a learning curve awaits in navigating the specific preservation, access and rights but we’re really pleased to ensure that these stories of RMIT continue to be heard.