Audiovisual Research Collections and Their Preservation Published

TAPE (Training for Audiovisual Preservation in Europe) has published Audiovisual Research Collections and Their Preservation.

Here's an excerpt from the introduction:

Digital technology has conquered audiovisual production, post-processing, and archiving. Audio has totally become part of the IT world, and video is about to follow the same way. All dedicated audio formats are dead, and soon the same will be the case for video formats. The pace by which dedicated audio and video formats are becoming obsolete is breathtaking. The problem is not so much the survival of the original documents, but the availability of highly specialised replay equipment which disappears from the market soon after a format has been abandoned commercially. Today audiovisual archives associations estimate the time window still open for the transfer of dedicated analogue and digital carriers into digital repositories to be not more than just 20 years.