National Association of Broadcasters Engineering Handbook, 11th Edition

Chapter11.3

Media Archives

James Snyder

Library of Congress

The audiovisual content industry stands at a crossroads at the writing of this chapter in 2016. Time is ticking on existing collections of audio and moving image content. We are at a technology crossroads spawned by fundamental changes in how content is captured, edited, distributed and archived. It is a survival crossroads for both the content that has come before and the content created from here on. The content created over the past century-plus since recording was invented lives on ephemeral carriers made of substances that don’t last more than about 5 years to 5 decades. Even if something has survived the self-editing already done by how collections of content have been created, ...