9th December – The Power of the VHS

Friday, 13 November 2009 16:15

The humble VHS videocassette is, rightly, regarded as a disposable commodity and not an archive medium, but the recordings on these cassettes are sometimes unique and irreplaceable. Since 1989 UK Universities and Colleges have created sizeable collections of valuable recordings on VHS under licence. Some of these collections run into many thousands.  Today however many universities need to reduce storage space and are shifting to other AV carrier media such as DVD or Blu-ray – so what is happening to all those VHS cassettes?

This meeting will address these urgent issues and will explore:

• low-cost digitisation and content transfer from VHS
• the creation of a union catalogue for copies of broadcast programmes held under licence
• results from the recent BUFVC UK national survey of off-air collections
• proposal for extension of ‘shared services’ for off-air recording
• online access to copies of programmes retained in educational establishments under licence

For further information and booking information go to the BUFVC website.