Audio Visual Special Interest Group

Check your local time for the event here.

This online members-only event will be held on the 25th of March at 10:00-11:00 UTC and is scheduled to suit Members based in UK, Europe, Africa, and Middle East. (click for local time).

You don’t need to join the AVSIG in order to attend one of our meetings; you just need to come from a DPC Member organization and pre-register for the event (see below) so that we have an idea of numbers.

The Audiovisual Special Interest Group (AVSIG) brings together any interested staff from DPC Member organizations to discuss issues and challenges relating to the preservation of digital content that is either audio, video, or both. The AVSIG provides an opportunity to share experiences, discuss good practice, and identify and address common problems. It aims to complement, not duplicate, the activities of any pre-existing groups, meetings, or activities that address the long-term preservation of AV content. Priority is given to discussions of real-world experiences and examples of proven good practice.

Our next meeting will begin with a case study from Ruth Cammies, Matthew Taylor and James Alexander from The Open University Archive about developing a workflow to bulk-migrate thousands of master digitised video files to FFV1 .mkv, and then moving the files from local hard drives to cloud storage. This will be followed by an open discussion about members experiences of similar migration projects – or future projects being planned."

We will close the meeting with a request from colleagues at the National Library of Scotland, who are seeking some guidance on the retention of born-digital archive carriers (e.g. harddrives), and interested to hear how other organizations handle such material. Further details are given in the meeting agenda, below.

Where possible, any presentations given at AVSIG meetings will be recorded and subsequently made available to Members via this event page.

If you have any questions or suggested topics for future meetings, please email: michael.popham@dpconline.org. (see below for the proposed date and time zone of AVSIG’s next meeting).

Agenda 

• Welcome

• Conflicts of Interest

• Presentation from Ruth Cammies, Matthew Taylor and James Alexander, followed by an open discussion.

• NLS-led discussion re. born-digital archive carriers:
  “We are looking for guidance on what to do with our digital AV media carriers once we have migrated data to our digital preservation systems. What is practice at your archive? While we continue to maintain film, video and audio on celluloid, magnetic tape and vinyl or shellac disc after digitisation/transfer. What should be our practice for physical media such as harddrives containing born-digital content, this could include DCPS.
  
  Is there any reason to treat harddrives the same as videotape? Is there any reason why we may have to return to the original? Could we keep a sample of harddrives as examples of how media was stored but not see them as original items worth preserving? Can we treat the transferred data as direct replica of what we received on the harddrive (as opposed to approximate replica through analogue to digital conversion)? Would this therefore also apply to other born-digital carriers CDs/DVDs?
  
  We want to know if other organisations especially those with cultural heritage collecting remits have approached this question. 

• Topics for future meetings / offers to present
  If you would like to present at this event e.g. about the work of your organization or to discuss an AV preservation challenge that you face, then do please get in touch! email: michael.popham@dpconline.org.

• AOB

• Date and topic of next meeting (28^th May 2026, details tbc) – provisionally timed to suit Members in Australasia and Asia-Pacific.

Registration (DPC members, please log in to register)

Got any questions? Please contact Michael Popham: michael.popham@dpconline.org

DPC Inclusion & Diversity Policy 

The DPC Community is guided by the values set out in our Strategic Plan and aims to be respectful, welcoming, inclusive and transparent. We encourage diversity in all its forms and are committed to being accessible to everyone who wishes to engage with the topic of digital preservation, whilst remaining technology and vendor neutral. We ask all those who are part of this community and/or attending an event to be positive, accepting, and sensitive to the needs and feelings of others in alignment with our DPC Inclusion & Diversity Policy.