Michael Popham is Digital Preservation Analyst at the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC)
The 27th October isn’t just the day we celebrate the births of the noted humanist Erasmus, violin virtuoso Paganini, poet Dylan Thomas, and comedian John Cleese – it also happens to be the date UNESCO selected as the World Day for Audiovisual Heritage. An annual reminder that, as UNESCO points out, “Audiovisual archives tell us stories about people’s lives and cultures from all over the world. They represent a priceless heritage which is an affirmation of our collective memory and a valuable source of knowledge…”
The DPC offers a number of resources relevant to preserving digital audiovisual heritage, authored by experts in the field. So this week would be a good time to check out some of our online publications, like Pragmatic Audiovisual Preservation (v 1.1) a Technology Watch Report by Ashley Blewer, or perhaps one of our shorter Guidance Notes on Preserving Audio or Preserving Moving Images (both of which were commissioned from Artefactual Systems).
In response to requests from DPC Members, we’ve also set up our own Audiovisual Special Interest Group (AVSIG), which provides a regular forum for anyone from any of our member organizations to come along and hear what others are doing with their digitized and born-digital audiovisual materials, to find out about standards, tools, and workflows, and to share experiences of audiovisual preservation.
The AVSIG meets online in different time zones every other month – to accommodate our global membership – but most presentations are also recorded and subsequently made available for those members who cannot attend a live meeting. The Group has recently heard from colleagues at CERN, the Media Preservation Labs at the University of Illinois, and the State Library of New South Wales, and our collection of presentations continues to grow.
Meetings are announced via all our usual channels, and staff from any member organization can sign-up in the usual way via the link on our Events Calendar. If preserving born-digital and digitized audiovisual heritage is of interest to you, whether you’re an expert or a beginner, then we’d love to see you at a future meeting of AVSIG.