UW Offers Free Film Preservation Manual

Available for free download is the Washington State Film Preservation Manual: Low-Cost and No-Cost Suggestions To Care For Your Film (PDF) by Nicolette Bromberg, Hannah Palin, and Libby Burke of the University of Washington Libraries.  It is recommended for anyone with a film collection.

It’s a good, basic but fairly thorough primer on how institutions (or individuals) with little or no funding for such things can undertake film preservation.  It includes the fundamentals (terminology, basic tech) as well as strategies and practices that should be followed.  It’s all very practical and realistic, easy to understand, and highly recommended.  There’s even sample forms like condition reports you can print out and use.  The “Resources and Bibliography” section is brief but well selected.

Preparation of the manual was funded by a grant several years ago from the Washington Preservation Initiative (WPI), which awarded $20,000 to the University of Washington Libraries to preserve films in their Special Collections (much it on 16mm) and create the manual for free distribution to other institutions.

This effort by Visual Materials Curator Nicolette Bromberg and her staff provided a springboard for the Washington Film Preservation Project in 2005-2006.  Funded by a $29,000 grant from the WPI, the Project brought together eight other museums, archives and libraries, as well as several institutions within the University of Washington, to learn film preservation techniques, and use the UW Libraries Special Collections’ facilities to inspect, clean, repair, and rehouse the films in their collections, as well as prepare digital masters and videotape viewing copies of selected holdings.

Also participating in the Washington Film Preservation Project were:

• The Burke Museum
• The Seattle Municipal Archives
• Everett Public Library
• The Highline Historical Society
• The Museum of History and Industry
• University of Washington Ethnomusicology Archives
• Weyerhaeuser Company Archives
• Providence Health System Archives
• The Museum of Flight
• The Yakama Nation

Among the member organizations, “there are approximately 6,000 films in collections ranging in size from 50 reels up to thousands, most of which are original and irreplaceable materials. The format of most of the films is 16mm, although there is some 35mm, Regular 8mm and Super 8mm among the holdings. The films come from every corner of our region and cover every conceivable genre from industrial and educational films, to documentation and research films, to films created by students and those produced by professionals.”

This was followed by public screenings of preserved films at the Northwest Film Forum, the Yakama Nation Native American Film Festival, and elsewhere.  Excerpts from 27  films in the UW collection are now available as Quicktime video on the Libraries’ Digital Collections web site.

Bromberg also made presentations about the Project to the Seattle Area Archivists, the Oregon State University Archives, and at the 2007 Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) annual conference in Rochester, NY.