AVPreserve at International Seminar of Sound and Audiovisual Archives

AVPreserve President Chris Lacinak has been invited to speak at the Sixth International Seminar of Sound and Audiovisual Archives in Mexico City, Mexico. Themed “The Democratization of Sound and Audiovisual Heritage in the Digital Age”, this year’s seminar is organized by the National Sound Recordings Library of Mexico as part of the Cooperation Program of the Latin American Summits: “Sound and Audiovisual IBERMEMORIA”, proposed by Mexico and the Latin American General Secretariat (SEGIB). The seminar promotes the conservation, use, and re-use of sound and audiovisual heritage in Latin America under the Cooperation Program’s efforts to establish a model for the integral conservation of sound, audiovisual, and filmic documents that make up the heritage of the countries of the region.

Chris will be speaking on Wednesday June 25th as part of a panel titled Digitizing collections: an ongoing challenge. He will be discussing our new preservation planning tool The Cost of Inaction Calculator, a free web-based application that allows users to quantify how many audiovisual assets and how much invested resources will be lost if their collection does not invest in digitization. Given the estimated 10-15 year window we have to save at least a portion of our audiovisual heritage before decay and obsolescence take their toll, the COI Calculator is a powerful new tool for planning and advocacy when trying to budget for and implement a reformatting project.

Just as archivists must begin a greater effort to partner with other departments throughout their organization, the crisis we are facing with audiovisual collections will require a large degree of international collaboration and knowledge sharing. We are very honored to have been invited to address the international audience attending the Seminar, and we look forward to seeing many of our friends at the event.