Draft:Preservation of audiovisual records

The preservation of audiovisual records is an important aspect of ensuring that information is safeguarded for future use. The National Film, Video, and Sound Archives, located in Pretoria, is responsible for preserving audiovisual records in South Africa.

The preservation of audiovisual records is an important aspect of ensuring that information is safeguarded for future use. The National Film, Video, and Sound Archives (NFVSA), located in Pretoria, is responsible for preserving audiovisual records in South Africa. The NFVSA is required by law to safeguard, preserve, and provide access to audiovisual records. They are required to comply with the National Archives Act, Act No. 43 of 1996. According to the Department of Sports and Culture, the mission of the National Film, Video, and Sound Archives is to collect audio-visual and related material that was made in or about South Africa; preserve the audio-visual heritage of South Africa; make the audio-visual heritage accessible to all South Africans; and promote audio-visual material and the audio-visual industries of the country. NFVSA is also required to comply with the Legal Deposit Act, Act 54 of 1997. This law intends to provide for the preservation of the national documentary heritage through legal deposit of published documents; to ensure the preservation and cataloguing of, and access to, published documents emanating from, or adapted for, South Africa; to provide for access to government information; to provide for a Legal Deposit Committee; and to provide for matters connected therewith. The NFVSA has a huge and versatile collection of audiovisual records that the public can consult for research, educational, entertainment, and evidence purposes. Research conducted by Ncala (2017) revealed that the 'NFVSA collection is comprised of 3000 books across all spectrums of the entertainment and AV preservation fields, 1000 rare film posters dating back to Die Voortrekkers (1916), 15 000 photographs that were related to various local feature films, and 1200 film scripts from various feature films made locally; most were pre-production scripts, thus differing vastly from the finished on-screen product, newspaper clippings, photographs, programmes and old brochures about the theatre, music, literature, and fine arts. They have the oldest film, dating back to 1898, one of more than 120 000 reels of film, and 23 500.00 videos in all formats, including DVDs. The sound collection consisted of more than 595 000 units in a range of sound formats.' NFVSA uses different preservations strategies to ensure that analogue, and information in obsolete carriers can be accessible to users. Solution in the fourth industrial revolution is 'digitisation'. For example, the dictabelts that were used in the court case of the Rivonia Trial have been digitised so that people can hear what transpired as well as the Treason Trial dictabelts. This was confirmed by the Deputy Minister of Sports, Arts, and Culture, Nocawe Mafa that 463 dictabelts of the Treason Trial were digitised against the set target of 30 000. It is interesting to see that the South African government is taking seriously the preservation of the AVR heritage so that future generations can have access to the events of the past and protect distortions in recorded history. From the archival science perspective, indeed, problems of deterioration and obsolescence of the AVR collection can be solved using the new technologies such as 'digitisation'. It is not useful to keep records that are in a format that is not supported by any technology 'obsolescence' as it is with the dictabelts, cassettes, CD's, and LP's 'vinyls' to mention a few. The SABC has also taken the same route as other archival institutions by digitising their broadcasting system from analogue to digital as well as digitising the TV news archives to digital. All these preservation reformatting strategies used by NFVSA and SABC both digitisation and migration, are very costly and require a serious budget hence collaboration has proved to make it possible for these projects to be successful. Moving forward, the universities have a responsibility to respond to the demand of new skills like those required in the digitisation and digitilisation processes. Institutions of higher learning have to teach new modules that will equip students to acquire skills that are needed in the fourth industrial revolution. NFVSA and SABC have led the way in the digitisation of audiovisual records therefore, other institutions that have analogue audiovisual collections can take lessons. A point of caution is that it cannot be done in isolation but through collaboration.