Preservation & Migration Commission

WHAT

Following the 2007 Lisbon conference, a decision was made by the executive board to establish a new Commission that would deal with problems related to Preservation and Migration. This page presents some actions propositions as well as the list of possible members of the Commission.

The main objective of the Preservation – Migration Commission (PMC) is to deal with aspects related to the preservation of any kind of audiovisual content on a long-time perspective. This concerns analogue as well as digital material, and the different solutions in order to guarantee the accessibility of audiovisual contents.

The different topics discussed in the Commission are:

1. Managing an Analogue Archive: How do conserve your asset when digitisation is not yet a possibility? Preventive actions, archive inventories and organisation, dealing with climate and physical degradation.
2. Analogue to Digital migration, or preservation process: How to get contents into the digital world? Technologies, methods, archive preparation, preservation planning and calculation. Negotiation issues with Service Providers. The results of the PrestoSpace project, software tools, methods and recommendations, will directly contribute to these issues.
3. Information systems for Archives: How to choose an information system? Procedures, ingestion planning, metadata organisation, exploitation issues. Formats and format encapsulation. (PrestoSpace results contribute here also)
4. Keeping your contents digital: How does time affect digital contents? Migration plans and migration difficulties. Checking the contents through time, integrity, permanence and authenticity issues.
5. Old equipment recuperation strategies: How to recover equipment that can be useful for archives with limited resources? Maintenance, manuals, spare parts, training, expertise on material, creating an exchange list and Forum, finding financing for transport.

HOW

The PMC will organise sessions during the annual conference. During the first year it will not organise any workshop, the members are starting to get together and need to structure the actions. Some possible ideas for next conference are the following:

1. Organise a “Archive clinic” session, in which participants that have previously registered meet one or two experts on a 20’ to 30’ slots, with no public around, to discuss precise problems concerning their archive. Archives send their questions previously to the experts. At the end of the day, some of the questions and answers are selected to be presented to all participants (with the agreement of the Archive that presented the problem).
2. Organise a machine demonstration session: following the idea of the DVD’s made within the PrestoSpace project, a technician will show how to operate a machine. The technician would not be alone; a second person will give more general information and ask questions or react to what is being said.
3. Migration session: the ABC of migration, 2 or 3 examples of successive migration, problems encountered. How do industrials see the problem. Maybe invite somebody from a completely different domain where migrations have been done many times to explain and show advantages and encountered problems.
4. Round table with Service Providers: How to they see the marketplace and what are the difficulties encountered.
5. Other loose ideas: What is a preservation workflow and how to organise it. Restoration and authenticity. Early born-digital formats and how to deal with them. Format evolution and their incidence in preservation and migration…

WHO

• Daniel Teruggi, Chair - INA
• PrestoSpace-Experts
• Archives representatives (e.g. US, Latin America, Asia, etc.)
• tbc