Preserving Home and Amateur Audiovisual Materials: A Critical Need

Funding for audiovisual preservation remains scarce, even as the volume of the discipline continues to grow. Preserving these regional movies is a race against time, as they often compete for conservation and restoration funding with main stream films, which are also at risk.

Many home movie materials are stored in private homes or facilities that lack proper environmental controls and expertise in care and maintenance, putting them at high risk of accelerated decay. While some funding is available, it is insufficient to address the vast number of works in urgent need of conservation.

The Al Larvick Conservation Fund (ALCF) seeks to bridge this gap by providing modest but vital support for the conservation and digitizatoin of home and amateur audiovisual materials. This fund is unique in its exclusive focus on this genre and its commitment to offering grants to individuals, institutions, and organizations. Beyond financial assistance, the fund provides guidance and support to assist collection holders with achievable personal preservation resources. Additionally, ALCF catalogues and programs collections in collaboration with its grant recipients.

The urgency of preserving these materials lies in the stories and histories they convey, which are distinct from other forms of documentation such as still photography or written records. Too often, home movies and amateur recordings are relegated to makeshift storage spaces, unseen and at risk of permanent loss. This media deserves to be preserved and shared.

Home, amateur and community recordings offer a unique window into the history of families, communities, and cultures. Since the emergence of recording technology, these works have captured the everyday experiences and perspectives of ordinary Americans. They provide valuable insights into our collective life and times, helping us understand our heritage, society, and culture. Through these stories, we gain a deeper understanding of the past, present, and future.

Conservation versus Preservation

The Al Larvick Conservation Fund focuses its efforts on conservation and digitization, and the contextualization and accessibility of home movies. The Fund is a small grant-making fund and realizes, due to its size, that it can make the most impact with these micro budgets by conserving, rather than preserving. The Fund defines conservation as the cleaning and repairing of original materials to the best of state-of-the-art film and video facilities’ abilities and within its budgets. The Fund defines preservation as a service, which creates film-to-film, or video-to-video masters. This is a greater expense and is one which other funders (i.e. National Film Preservation Foundation) require as part of their program. Because public accessibility is part of this Fund’s mandate, we require and include a primary digital file in high resolution (current digital standards for each format) and another in a web friendly format for posting as part of our grant awards. While the Fund will consider full preservations, it will be on a case-by-case basis and will be looked at when a strong applicant’s source materials are thought to be in critical need of preservation.

Why digital capture?

A simple Youtube “home movie footage” search produced 8,150,000 results. The Home Movie Collection on Internet Archive (www.archive.org) as of this writing offers over 1,000 videos for viewing and download and there are many works outside the collection on archive.org that would fill the home and amateur category. The public has a fascination and love for home recordings. Because of the abundance of these works, one might question why there is a need for more crowding of the Internet.

Unfortunately much of the audiovisual material available online is achieved through do-it-yourself methods, or businesses which offer inexpensive but low-end transfers onto highly compressed, and soon to be dated formats. These methods remove detail that creates a richer viewing experience and leaves important historical and cultural clues out of the picture, including potential loss of sound.

A do-it-yourself digital transfer project can present risks by threading fragile film and video through dated and unmaintained projectors or decks, where they can tear or get stuck. Additionally, originals and their playback equipment are often already damaged or in need of cleaning. Transferring recordings in these states can cause further harm. Going through a business which offers great prices but lacks state-of-the-art, regularly maintained equipment, can be equally risky. The Fund seeks to contribute toward a broader public understanding of the value of producing quality and interesting programming around these works, and how to protect these precious audio/visual recordings.

The Fund’s Best Practices guide is intended to assist grantees with caring for original materials and includes resource options and practices for maintenance and storage of various analog and digital assets. The digital files are for grantees’ own use and archiving purposes, but also to make the works available for public viewing on the Internet, via archive.org (a requirement of the Fund's grants). The Community Sharing guide will give instruction on uploading digital files and logging appropriate meta-data, so the content is further understandable and put into context for a wider audience. It will also include information on how to share offline, with one’s local community. Additionally the Fund will include a reference sheet on Creative Commons licensing for managing and protecting one’s online content.

We know people and organizations care about their media and their audiences do too. They want to be able to see Peggy Lee’s face in a small town North Dakota parade, the detail on their grandmother’s dress, the ability to clearly read a sign, or identify individuals in the background. These particulars are what drive audience interest. The more people see the significance of this content, the Fund believes they will care more about conserving and transferring their materials in a way that protects and makes them available for generations to come. Providing quality digital transfers will contribute to achieving awareness.