Dave Heelas is the Archivist and Records Manager for Unilever Art, Archives & Records Management.
This post is the second in a series of three.
A second area that has been raising a lot of questions for digital preservation within Unilever’s collections is the Audio-Visual collections. As we have more and more digitised material it became a priority to move these from the external storage they were on into a more managed and protected environment in the form of the digital preservation repository.
In this short blog I will focus on the digitised AV collections within Unilever.
AV stores
We hold significant amounts of audio visual material. In particular there are several external hard drives filled with digitised film reels, this has resulted in very large file sizes which are proving to be quite an issue in how we go about ingesting them into our digital preservation repository. The complexity associated with these file types as well is something that will require a lot more research going forwards, and the size will have significant implications on the cost of storage as we move forwards.
It has been interesting to find that the file size has proven to be such a notable issue. With the current setup attempting to ingest them has made us realise our limitations in this regard. The speed of trying to pull these from a USB 2 external hard drive and then ingest them into out digital preservation system has been prohibitive. Not only that but due to the file size it has meant that we have encountered issues with storage space on our machines before even beginning the transfer process itself. This has meant that the whole process has been incredibly slow to complete and has revealed how time consuming having significant external storage can be.
In many ways what we expected would be a ‘mundane’ issue such as the file size limitation has taken up a significant quantity of time and looks to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. This also highlights that as the company moves more and more into the cloud, how that will that impact us with the potential need for larger storage. Even if it is only temporary.
Conclusion
As we move forwards with more digitisation projects to protect and make available our AV material, particularly now VHS content, we will need to take a step back in how we are retrieving the digitised versions in order to ingest them. The current process is working, but time consuming. We are lucky enough that much of the future video are likely to be shorter as it is probably they are ad reels. Because of this the file size may not be as big of an issue moving forwards but it has still made a flaw in our current processes noticeable. But it still leaves the question of how to ingest a file that is even larger than what we have currently dealt with. As video moves more into 4K and beyond, this may become a reality sooner rather than later.
Next month, Dave's third post will be on the subject of email preservation.