IASA 2019 Annual Conference

Following a Mellon Foundation funded audio and moving image (AMI) collections survey, the New York Public Library established the AMI Initiative to preserve more than a quarter-million recordings identified as at risk or mission critical. The Library’s Audio and Moving Image Preservation program has had to rapidly evolve to meet the expectations of preserving more items per year than it had in its first decade of digitization. Staff skills, workflows, and specifications have transformed to better respond to resource constraints and program sustainability, with increased use of scripting, open source tools, and notably, lossless compression for all digitized AMI formats. Meanwhile, additional services are being tested and implemented while repository expansion is underway. Examples include new mechanisms for staff access as media is queued for ingest, and web accessibility improvements such as viewer features, transcripts, captioning, etc. With more than 180,000 recordings digitized by the end of 2019, along with the infrastructure improvements underway, the Library continues to meet major benchmarks in its goals for the audio and moving image collections. This presentation will discuss lessons learned, current work, and plans for continued progress.