Surveying our audiovisual holdings
Find out how we're surveying our audiovisual holdings as part of the Utaina project.
Archives New Zealand, National Library and Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision are working together on Utaina, a project to convert physical audio and visual media into digital formats to preserve the country’s audiovisual heritage for future generations.
The project will eventually preserve over 400,000 items, including around 10,000 from Archives New Zealand – but before we can send our holdings to be digitised, we need to understand exactly what they contain, what state they’re in and whether they need special handling or treatment.
Preliminary survey
A team of preservation technicians is surveying our audiovisual magnetic media to answer these questions. Magnetic media come in many shapes and sizes, from well-known formats like cassettes and videos to obscure ones like Sepmag (magnetic sound on film), DAT and open reel tapes. Each format has its own special requirements for handling and surveying.
The team conducting the survey finds and physically assesses every item in our holdings that will be digitised as part of Utaina. The preservation technicians check the physical condition of each item, and make sure its descriptive and technical record is correct in our collections management system. They inspect the record to find any extra information our digitisation partner Memnon needs, like format, speed, audio filters and orientation. This preparation is crucial – it means we can address any issues before records reach the digitisation stage.
If a record needs preservation work, or its description needs modifying, we note this so we can work on it in the next phase of preparation.
Keeping track of our records
Our next step is assigning each item a barcode, which is matched to its record in our collections management system. Records are scanned into a logistics tool at every stage of the journey – when they leave the repository, arrive at Memnon’s digitisation studio and return to us. This way, we can track our holdings and create a record each time they change location.
Valuable team members
The preservation technicians who’ve done this work are valuable members of the Utaina project. The information they’re recording will deepen our understanding of our holdings and collections, help Memnon digitise our audiovisual material more efficiently, and accelerate our ability to preserve our audiovisual holdings for the future.
Luke Inglis – Senior Archivist, Archives New Zealand
Madeleine Ross – Library Assistant, Alexander Turnbull Library