31 Oct Preserving Memories at JIBC
“VHS-kaamera” by is licensed under CC0
Remember VHS? Betacam? Hi8 and MiniDV? All of these video formats, some analog, some digital, are obsolete. How can we preserve these memories when nobody has a tape machine anymore? What’s the best way to future proof this media?
At JIBC we have decided to archive all of our old video tapes by converting them to digital formats. For viewing we use MP4 and for preservation we went with uncompressed AVI, which creates huge files but the resolution is better than the original source tapes.
These old tapes show who we were and where we come from. There are award winning education and training videos, how-to videos, graduation ceremonies, and the techniques, training methods and fashion choices of JIBC’s 40 year history.
Yes, JIBC is celebrating 40 years in 2018. What better time than now to preserve our memories.
With funding from JIBC’s CTLI (Centre for Teaching, Learning & Innovation) and a lot of hard work from our library’s staff, who watches and sorts every video, we are outsourcing our precious videos to a duplication company and getting back high resolution digital video files that we plan to upload into our institutional repository called The Vault – jibc.arcabc.ca
I’ll let the library tell you about The Vault –
Our newest creation, The Vault, is an online institutional repository which showcases JIBC scholarly output, including faculty publications and a selection of student capstone research projects. It also provides access to hundreds of institutional documents, including decades of annual reports and newsletters as well as two books published by JIBC. Eventually it will also become a home for videos and archival photos. The Vault is a result of the JIBC Library collaboration with Arca, a province-wide network of institutional repositories, made possible by a partnership with the BC Electronic Library Network.
So far we have converted 40 videos, with another 20 currently being digitized and another 100 to be done in the near future. That’s the easy ones on VHS and Betacam SP. The real fun will start when we get into the old 1 inch video reels and 8mm film footage.