2020 IASA - FIAT/IFTA Joint Conference

This presentation will outline the ways the National Library of Scotland’s Moving Image Archive has been actively seeking partnership and collaboration to fund new video digitisation projects and talk honestly about the challenges and opportunities this has brought to traditional ways of working.

Focussing on a recent donation of some 500 videotapes from Scottish Ballet, find out how we worked in collaboration to prioritise, preserve, digitise and share hundreds of unique performances from dancers across the decades – all against a ticking clock!

Curators have had to innovate to hit project targets and drive the changes in the workflows that are needed to deliver access to the collection. Project staff in technical and cataloguing have brought with them new skills and encouraged us to look afresh at how collections are managed.

Examples of challenges (with audiovisual examples)
• Technical (running three stream digital capture at once, digital restoration work, first use of the National Library’s Scality digital preservation system, the challenges of procuring specialised equipment)
• Organisation (embedding project staff from Scottish Ballet in to the NLS, funding challenges of large scale digitisation)
• Curatorial (joint clip selection, long term agreement re digital seasons - to continue bringing in Scottish Ballet performances in the future, managing the changing nature of cataloguing and metadata and how we appraise analogue audiovisual material in a digital world, rights management / remote online viewing)

With the project coming to an end in March 2020, this will prove a timely opportunity to update on possibilities for future collaborative work (eg. the Modern Ballet course at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, the Scottish Ballet Archive held at Glasgow University’s Theatre Archive, as well as facilities for educational and community engagement)

The presentation will be illustrated with digitised content throughout.