media preservation

Legendary pianist Menahem Pressler’s 1982 faculty concert performance of Dvořák’s Piano Quintet in A major with the International String Quartet was heard on the Bloomington campus last week for the first time in many years. Carried on three reels of Scotch 208 open reel tape, the performance was the first one digitized as part of the Cook … Continue reading »

This third post from an ongoing series on prioritization explores our attempts to articulate the functions and uses of time-based media, part of our work developing a software application for assessing the value of IU’s audio, video, and film collections. The title of Bruno Bettelheim’s classic work on fairy tales—The Uses of Enchantment—provides a vivid … Continue reading »

…we cannot save every recording. What, then, do we save? The State of Recorded Sound Preservation in the United States: A National Legacy at Risk in the Digital Age  -CLIR/Library of Congress The Media Preservation Initiative (MPI) at IU Bloomington is embarking upon a campus-wide media preservation prioritization process beginning spring semester 2012. See the previous … Continue reading »

Priority is a function of context -Stephen R. Covey Several lively conversations at the Association of Moving Image Archivists conference a few weeks ago centered on the selection for preservation process. Why prioritize—can’t (or shouldn’t) we save it all? That was one viewpoint, further refined by: Why prioritize? Digitize it all—it takes more resources to … Continue reading »