If you have a VHS tape of your child’s Bat Mitzvah, but your VCR isn’t hooked up any more – or there’s a film noir you saw at a college campus screening a long time ago, but you can’t remember what it was and want to see it again – or you have streaming services and are wondering if you really need your DVD player any more, you are thinking about film, video and digital media preservation. Here are some projects that tackle those issues.
Moving Image Preservation of Puget Sound (MIPoPS) began after a stint of volunteering with the 16 mm film collection at Seattle Municipal Archives (SMA), and grad school in moving image preservation at UCLA. Founded in 2014 by a group of archivists, and located at SMA at City Hall, the mission of MIPoPS is to assist archives, libraries, museums and other non-profits manage their legacy video tape. We’re a big part of digitizing, educating the general public, and making accessible the moving image history of the Pacific Northwest. Moving Image Preservation of Puget Sound is making a dent in the magnetic media crisis afflicting videotapes worldwide, by focusing on the stories locked on videotape at non-profits in the Pacific Northwest. MIPoPS is proud to have preserved and digitized tapes for Seattle Art Museum, Scarecrow Video, Southwest Seattle Historical Society, and more.
Moving Image Archive News: Since 2010, MIAN has been a free online publication edited by journalist Peter Monaghan and published by me. We write long-form pieces about film and video collections around the world, talk about film screenings in person and remote, and showcase thinkers, scholarship and fan communities. Here are some favorite pieces of mine: Tribe Sourcing the American Indian Film Gallery, Any Day is a Good Day for Smelling Movies, Songs From Over the Top. At Moving Image Archive News, Peter Monaghan also writes about the crisis in magnetic media, and other media archiving and preservation subjects, providing an in-depth look at the people and projects in the field.