According to a 2015 study carried out by Cisco, by 2019 over 80% of global Internet consumption will be video content. These steadily increasing sounds and images have permeated every sphere of our contemporary lives. Advances in technology have ensured that every individual can create as well as curate digital sound and image content. Big digitization projects of dedicated national repositories and commercial broadcasters have helped to increase our access to moving images and sounds of the past. Still, in reality they represent just a fraction of the valuable content, which remains locked in obsolete carriers in different types of cultural institutions all across the world. As audio and visual material grows at an exponential rate, the resources available to collection institutions remain fixed. Unless urgent action is taken, most sound and image heritage from the last century will disappear.
In response to at-risk sound and image collections, ICCROM introduced its Sound and Image Collections Conservation (SOIMA) programme in 2007. With its aim of building capacity for preservation and creative use of sound and image heritage, the SOIMA programme educates professionals on the importance of sound and image preservation in the rapidly expanding digital universe.
For many reasons, challenges remain in assessing mixed sound and image collections in order to identify at risk content and carriers, and to prioritize records for digitization. As part of SOIMA’s efforts to revitalize training and create self-help materials, we have designed a simple survey to understand better why collection assessment continues to be challenging, and what can be done to overcome this challenge.
This survey is anonymous and takes less than five minutes. Your feedback is important for us!
The deadline is 10 July 2018.
Take the survey now!