feb08c.indd


Jane Hedberg P r e s e r v a t i o n  N e w s  

Film preservation guide 
The Society of American Archivists (SAA) 
has published Film Preservation: Competing 
Definitions of Value, Use, and Practice. In 
this 296­page soft cover book, Karen Gracy 
offers an ethnographic study of fi lm archiving 
and preservation in the United States. She 
examines the history, economics, cultural 
context, and evolution of the fi eld, providing 
a context for understanding preservation of 
this relatively new popular art form. 

The book costs $56 for nonmembers or 
$40 for members, and is available from SAA, 
527 S. Wells St., 5th Floor, Chicago, IL 60607; 
phone: (312) 922­0140; fax: (312) 347­1452; 
URL: www.archivists.org/catalog/pubDetail. 
asp?objectID=2146. 

Sound Directions 
Indiana University and Harvard University 
announce the release of Sound Directions: 
Best Practices for Audio Preservation. The 
result of a two­year project funded by the 
National Endowment for the Humanities, 
Sound Directions identifies many best prac­
tices for digitization of audio media and 
examines existing and emerging standards. It 
contains chapters about the project, person­
nel and equipment for preservation transfer, 
digital files, metadata, storage, preservation 
packages and interchange, and systems and 
workflows. Each chapter has two parts, the 
first an overview intended for a general audi­
ence and the second recommended technical 
practices intended for audio engineers and 
digital librarians. 

The 168­page report is available as 
a free PDF at www.dlib.indiana.edu 
/projects/sounddirections/papersPresent 
/sd_bp_07.pdf. For more information about 
the project, go to www.dlib.indiana.edu 
/projects/sounddirections/index.shtml. 

Jane Hedberg is preservation program offi  cer at Harvard 
University Library, e-mail: jane_hedberg@harvard.edu; 
fax: (617) 496-8344 

Guide to digitization of fi lm 
Folkstreams.net, a Web site devoted to 
documentary films about American folk 
culture made by amateur fi lmmakers, has 
published Guide to Best Practices in Film 
Digitization, by Heather Barnes of the School 
of Information and Library Science at the 
University of North Carolina­Chapel Hill. The 
Guide describes in detail how Folkstreams 
converted 16mm film and video tape into 
digital files for upload to its Web site. It also 
covers discovery, acquisition and selection of 
films for digitization, digitization issues and 
workflows, Web stream creation, Web site 
infrastructure and site development, meta­
data, preservation, advertising, and outreach. 
This project is of particular interest because 
the films are still in copyright and the guide 
contains a section about rights and obtaining 
permissions. 

The guide is available free­of­charge at 
www.folkstreams.net/bpg/index.html. 

CALIPR audio visual survey 
The California Preservation Program has 
surveyed the preservation needs of moving 
image and recorded sound collections in the 
state. Thirty­two repositories containing ap­
proximately 1 million recordings participated. 
It used a survey instrument adapted from 
CALIPR, an instrument for surveying paper­
based collections developed at the University 
of California­Berkeley in the early 1990s. Al­
though the data are representative only of the 
institutions surveyed, the results do provide 
some indication of the scale of the preservation 
challenge. Seventy­two percent of the items 
surveyed are important enough to be replaced 
if damaged or lost, 57 percent have historical 
value, 9 percent have observable damage, and 
32 percent are uncataloged. 

The final report is available free­of­charge 
at calpreservation.org/management/cppav 
/CPPAV_finalreport_14oct07.pdf. CALIPR is 
available free­of­charge at sunsite3.berkeley. 
edu/CALIPR/introduction.html. 

C&RL News February 2008  104 

www.folkstreams.net/bpg/index.html
http:Folkstreams.net
mailto:jane_hedberg@harvard.edu
http:www.dlib.indiana.edu
http:www.dlib.indiana.edu
www.archivists.org/catalog/pubDetail