42nd Annual Meeting- Electronic Media Session, May 31, 2014, "The California Audiovisual Preservation Project: A Statewide Collaborative Model to Preserve the State’s Documentary Heritage by Pamela Jean Vadakan"

The California Light and Sound Collection is the product of a collaboration between 75 partner institutions with original recordings of audiovisual content in California. Following a 2007 statewide collection survey that used the University of California’s CALIPR sampling tool, it was discovered that over 1 million recordings were in need of preservation. In 2010, the California Audiovisual Preservation Project (CAVPP) was founded. Recipients of a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the CAVPP uploaded its first video in 2011.
Like previous statewide initiatives within the California Preservation Program, the project is based at the University of California at Berkeley, where Barclay Ogden provides leadership for the project. By repurposing existing staff and existing tools, the project is able to realize a high level of efficiency. Each partner institution is responsible for surveying its own collection with CALIPR, adding its own records to CONTENTdm, and sending its own recordings with metadata to CAVPP. It is anticipated that open-source tool OMEKA will replace CONTENTdm, because the project partners should not be dependent upon costly proprietary software site licenses.
CAVPP adds administrative metadata, confirms the descriptive metadata, and sends content to the vendors. The vendors include MediaPreserve, Scenesavers, and Bay Area Video Coalition. The vendors produce a preservation file, a mezzanine file, and an access file for each item. Moving forward the project will discontinue creating the mezzanine file, because the preservation file is more useful. Two copies of each file are saved to Linear-tape-open (LTO) and one on the Internet Archive’s servers. Storage costs are about five dollars per recording. CAVPP is also responsible for running checksums and checking video quality. Problems have included out of sync audio, shifts in hue or saturation (chrominance), and shifts in value (luminance). The AV Artifact Atlas has proven essential to the quality control process.
It is crucial for a project this large to have a clear scope in terms of both content and format. The criteria for selection include statewide or local significance, unpublished or original source material, and public domain content. The project also encompasses content for which rights have already been acquired. In some cases, “unknown” has been used a placeholder for missing copyright information. The materials are also subject to triage in terms of the original physical format and condition (preservation need). The project is limited to digital conversion. Film-to-film conversion is outside the scope of the project, but it is hoped that project partners can leverage this project to facilitate projects for high-definition video and film-to-film conversion.
The project has already exceeded its original goals. In the first year, CAVPP uploaded 50 recordings. Now the project has grown to 75 institutions and over 1,400 recordings. It is anticipated that there will be over 3,000 recordings by the end of 2014. Future steps include an assessment of who is using the collection and how they are using it. The project also includes outreach workshops scheduled for project partners in 2014 and 2015.