In
2005, the United Nations declared 27th October as the
annual World Day for Audiovisual Heritage. What does this mean for
you and I?
That
depends on how much you care about preserving recorded material,
which admittedly is a nerdy passion. But whatever. I'm interested.
You'll possibly be familiar with Throwback Thursday, or #tbt on
social media- the trend of uploading old pictures once a week. These
are normally developed photographs which were scanned in and saved as
JPEG, then uploaded to the internet. Audiovisual content, though, is
more than pictures- it's video and sound recordings too. Where might
these be found? Cupboards at home. Picture albums. Boxes of VHS tapes
in the loft. Many possible places.
Video
is a format that people are particularly keen to protect- we've been
using VHS for decades, and still do. They can last up to 10-25 years
in proper storage.
But once they're digitised, the quality never drops- so get
transferring! Either wire up your DVD recorder, VHS player and TV
together... or take it to Max Spielmann.
Next
step: upload. Facebook is a difficult platform to properly share on,
as most people choose the “friends only” level of security. And
even then, there's no way to search for videos on Facebook. Youtube
is a better bet as you can add the relevant tags to the video, making
it more searchable. Pictures can be uploaded to the likes of Twitter,
personal blogs, Flickr and Instagram, but remember to properly tag
them so that people searching for that content can find it. Otherwise
the only the people who will stumble across it are those scrolling in
their Thursday timeline.
Upload
it to the site that you'd like the most traffic on. For me, that's
this blog.
Then:
share via social media. Let people know that the content is there and
preserved online. Think about who would be particularly interested.
Who's in the picture? If it's a local celebrity, would the local
papers be curious? They will more than likely have a Twitter account,
which is a good platform for sharing links, so show them from that
site.
In
essence- use today as an excuse to rummage through your old tapes,
and get preserving those memories!
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