Saving Hampshire History – one VHS/DVD at a time

An article in today’s Inside Higher Education describes the significant challenges Colleges and Universities face with audio and visual materials that must be reformatted and preserved before the original files become obsolete. The article, “A Race Against Time to Preserve University Media Collections” highlights some of the challenges the Harold F. Johnson Library is tackling with our own audio visual archives.

This year, the library hand delivered 200 DVD and VHS Division III recordings to Northeast Historic Film in Bucks Harbor ME, along with a significant number of 16 mm films that are rare and archival, for storage and digitization. We recently recevied digitized versions of each of the Division IIIs and will be making them available for use this summer, and it will be the first time these Division IIIs have been available since these Hampshire students graduated, between ca. 1980 and now.

Special thanks to the library staff who made this digitization possible, including Neil Young (Manager of Media Services), John Bruner (Advanced Media Coordinator), Matt Newman (Media Services Production Coordinator), Tatjana Mackin (Library and Knowledge Commons Adminsitrative Assistant) as well as previous employees Angelina Altobellis and Jocelyn Edens.