Audiovisual Collections: Processing and Preserving our Film & Video

Friday, February 19, 2016

In 2015, Hagley Library’s Audiovisual and Digital Initiatives Department launched a 3-year plan to enhance access to our collections of photographs, motion pictures, and sound recordings. Part of that plan included improving access to our films and videos that are estimated at over 10,000 individual titles. Our moving images content is in a variety of formats with 16mm being the primary film medium and VHS, Beta, and U-matic the main video formats (although we have many more).

The first step toward making our films and videos available to researchers is to process and create inventories (or finding aids). Our Audiovisual Archivist - Laurie Sather - focused much of her time last year on that work. Processing includes rehousing content into proper storage enclosures, organizing the materials, and creating detailed title and format lists for every title in the collection (links to inventories for film and video collections are below).

Creating thorough inventories of our films and videos will allow us to share details about this content via our finding aids database and library catalog. Just as important, it allows us to plan how we are going to preserve this material going forward. Of course, the best way to preserve and share this content is to digitize it and add it to our online public archives -- work that requires significant time and resources. The inventories we are producing during our 3-year-plan will give us the information we need to prioritize digitization over the next decade.

The department acquired the necessary infrastructure last year to digitize analog videotapes -- an unstable medium that has a much shorter shelf life than film thus creating more urgency to convert it. We are currently working on a funded video digitization project scheduled to launch in 2017 for the National Automobile Dealers Association. In addition, the department is working on building a new (and improved) digital archives scheduled to launch this summer that will eventually allow researchers to watch selections (and, hopefully, someday all) of our moving picture content.

The film and video collections at Hagley are a significant source for researching the history of business and technology in the second half of the 20th century. We are excited with the work we have done so far and especially excited for researchers to tap into this material.

A listing of inventories (aka finding aids) on our website with film and video content:

All American Engineering Corporation photographs and audiovisual materials

DuPont Company films and commercials

Crawford H. Greenewalt films and sound recordings

W.W. Laird collection of graphic materials and family movies

Seagram Museum collection of photographs and audiovisual material

Sperry Corporation, UNIVAC Division photographs and audiovisual materials

Chamber of Commerce of the United States photographs and audiovisual materials

MCI Communications Corporation photographs and audiovisual materials

Wilmington Public Library films

Avon Products Inc. photographs and audiovisual materials

Wawa, Inc. Public Relations photographs and audiovisual materials

Please check back on our site as we will be posting new inventories in the coming months and years. If you have any questions, please contact us at askhagley@hagley.org.

Kevin Martin is the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Audiovisual and Digital Collections at the Hagley Library

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