On a recent trip to one of Britain’s most significant community archives, I was lucky enough to watch a rare piece of digitised video footage from the late 1970s. As the footage played it raised many questions in my mind: who shot it originally? What format was it originally created on? How was it edited?… Continue reading Digital Video in Mixed-Content Archives
Tag: access
British Stand Up Comedy Archive’s audiovisual collections
Greatbear have recently worked with the British Stand Up Comedy Archive (BSUCA) to reformat a number of Digital Audio Tapes (DATs) and U-Matic video tapes from their collection. Established in 2013 and based at the University of Kent’s Special Collections, the BSUCA aims ‘to celebrate, preserve, and provide access to the archives and records of… Continue reading British Stand Up Comedy Archive’s audiovisual collections
Digitising small audiovisual collections: making decisions and taking action
Deciding when to digitise your magnetic tape collections can be daunting. The Presto Centre, an advocacy organisation working to help ‘keep audiovisual content alive,’ have a graphic on their website which asks: ‘how digital are our members?’ They chart the different stages of ‘uncertainty,’ ‘awakening’, ‘enlightenment’, ‘wisdom’ and ‘certainty’ that organisations move through as they… Continue reading Digitising small audiovisual collections: making decisions and taking action
Open Source Solutions for Digital Preservation
In a technological world that is rapidly changing how can digital information remain accessible? One answer to this question lies in the use of open source technologies. As a digital preservation strategy it makes little sense to use codecs owned by Mac or Windows to save data in the long term. Propriety software essentially operate… Continue reading Open Source Solutions for Digital Preservation
Digital Preservation – Establishing Standards and Challenges for 2014
2014 will no doubt present a year of new challenges for those involved in digital preservation. A key issue remains the sustainability of digitisation practices within a world yet to establish firm standards and guidelines. Creating lasting procedures capable of working across varied and international institutions would bring some much needed stability to a profession often characterized… Continue reading Digital Preservation – Establishing Standards and Challenges for 2014
Digital Preservation and Copyright
Most customers who send us tape to digitise own the copyright of their recording: it is material they have created themselves, be it music, spoken word or film. Occasionally customers are not so sure if they own the full copyright to their recordings. This is because a single piece of work can have multiple copyright… Continue reading Digital Preservation and Copyright
Parsimonious Preservation – (another) different approach to digital information management
We have been featuring various theories about digital information management on this blog in order to highlight some of the debates involved in this complex and evolving field. To offer a different perspective to those that we have focused on so far, take a moment to consider the principles of Parsimonious Preservation that has been… Continue reading Parsimonious Preservation – (another) different approach to digital information management
Digital Preservation – Planning for the Long Term
There are plenty of reflections on the Great Bear tape blog about the fragility of digital data, and the need to think about digitisation as part of a wider process of data migration your information will need to make in its lifetime. We have also explored how fast moving technological change can sometimes compromise our… Continue reading Digital Preservation – Planning for the Long Term
Convert, Join, re encode AVCHD .MTS files in Ubuntu Linux
One of our audio and video archive customers has a large collection of AVCHD video files that are stored in 1.9GB ‘chunks’ as xxxxx.MTS files. All these files are of 60 minute and longer duration and must be joined, deinterlaced, re encoded to a suitable size and bitrate then uploaded for online access. This is… Continue reading Convert, Join, re encode AVCHD .MTS files in Ubuntu Linux