SMPL Renews Partnership with California Audiovisual Preservation Project
In an important collaboration this month, Stanford Media Preservation Lab and the Department of Special Collections & University Archives are participating in the California Audiovisual Preservation Project, a pioneering statewide initiative, for a third round in a row. The CAVPP is providing funds to reformat film and video selections from SULAIR’s collections, including newly resurrected video from the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Stanford University Film Collection. These items will be sent to an outside vendor with the equipment necessary to capture preservation-quality digital files from these unique materials in obsolete formats. The digitized content will be preserved in the Stanford Digital Repository and made broadly available to the public through the California Light and Sound collection at the Internet Archive.
The CAVPP works to provide digitization and access for historic California audiovisual recordings, as well as establish low-cost and practical standards to help organizations reformat their analog content. The Internet Archive and the Online Archive of California contribute to the project with storage for preservation, as well as by providing online access to teachers, researchers and students. There are nineteen California library and archive partners participating in the project, with funding provided through the California State Library and the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program at New York University. Recently awarded a major grant from the NEH, the CAVPP will be directly responsible for preserving over two hundred audio and moving image recordings this year through the digitization services they offer to partner organizations. Stanford Media Preservation Lab has provided support to the CAVPP project since its start with consultation and assistance with quality control of digitized content. The first two rounds of materials nominated by SULAIR provided reformatting for film and video media from the Buckminster Fuller Papers, the Apple Computer Inc. Records, and the Ampex Collection.
A demo video of "Lisa", an early personal computer developed by Apple
A demonstration of the Videofile Information System developed at Ampex in 1968.
