Exploring

Reformatting Media Collections

Deteriorating negatives (such as broken glass plate negatives or nitrate- or acetate-based negatives) may need to be duplicated.

As you have seen in Session 2: Deterioration of Paper Collections and Session 3: Deterioration of Film and Electronic Media of this course, some visual media and sound recordings have significantly shorter life expectancies than paper collections. This is partly because, unlike paper-based collections, many audiovisual materials must be played in machines to retrieve their information.

Even minimal playback leads to wear and tear, and playback machinery can become obsolete in a relatively short time. Magnetic and optical media may also be subject to catastrophic failure without any warning. In addition, new still and moving images and sound recordings are now frequently being produced in digital form. These are then subject to the difficulties of preserving digital information (discussed in the Digitization section of this session).

Duplication or reformatting onto appropriate media is an important preservation activity for audiovisual collections. Reformatting can provide service copies for deteriorating materials, preservation-quality copies on a more stable medium, and/or preservation masters to replace deteriorating or obsolete formats.

Reformatting choices must be made carefully, since costs for copying materials can be very high, ranging from several hundred dollars to copy one hour of videotape to a preservation master to thousands of dollars to create a duplicate negative and print for a relatively short 16mm black and white film.