March 28, 2011 -- The Library of Congress and its partners were well represented at the Screening for the Future 2011 (external link) conference, held March 14-15 in the Netherlands.
The conference featured 22 experts speaking on a variety of issues relating to the stewardship of film, video and other audiovisual productions. Topics included digitization, strategies for sustainable funding and preservation, both of analog and digital content.
The meeting was also marked by the inauguration of PrestoCentre (external link), a membership organization for stakeholders in audiovisual digitization and digital preservation. PrestoCentre provides advice to custodians and creators of audiovisual content and works closely with international experts.
Brewster Kahle, of the Internet Archive, gave a keynote address on his organization’s current costs for digitizing analog collections, which he states is "low enough, even at high quality, that we can proceed en-masse." David Rosenthal, of the Stanford University LOCKSS Project, presented on "how many copies should I keep" for preserving digital information.
James Snyder, from the Library’s Packard Campus of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, participated in a "Building Workflows for Digitization and Digital Preservation" masterclass. The class was intended to help archives, libraries and museums build digitization workflows for film, audiotape and videotape, including a review of options and trade-offs among different approaches.
