Rare Books and Manuscripts Curators, like our colleagues around the world, worry every day about the lifespans of the audiovisual materials entrusted to our care.  We welcome this opportunity to remind the wider community just how valuable AND how vulnerable they are, calling attention to the UNESCO World Day for Audiovisual Heritage.

World Day for Audiovisual Heritage poster

At the same time as this year’s celebration of the World Day for Audiovisual Heritage 2014, the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library is delighted to officially announce the completion of one of our many digitization projects, the videotaped interviews in the Jessica Mitford collection. The Mitford Collection has been particularly popular among researchers. The videos, recorded on U-matic tapes, were no longer accessible for viewing in the reading room. Even if we were to borrow a U-matic player from another campus office we would be hesitant to play the tapes for fear of causing permanent damage. Instead, we entrusted professionals to play them and simultaneously transfer them to digital format in the process. At the same time, the University Libraries is in the process of establishing standards and guidelines for preserving the digital files locally, so that we are prepared to transfer these precious recordings to new formats and storage media in the future.