Preservation Publication Award: Activists' Guide to Archiving Video

Activists' Guide to Archiving Video, published by WITNESS, a nonprofit organization that uses video to expose human rights abuses, is the 2014 recipient of the Preservation Publication Award. Activists' Guide to Archiving Video focuses on preserving digital video, an area in which there is still little published guidance. Available freely online in three languages, the guide is organized into eight sections that focus on stages in a video archiving workflow: create, transfer, acquire, organize, store, catalog, preserve, and share. Unlike other resources, it is aimed at content creators rather than archivists, enabling interventions that support preservation early in the digital lifecycle. The guide also uses easy-to-understand language and low-cost recommendations that empower individuals and grassroots organizations with fewer resources to take action to safeguard their own valuable collections. To date, the guide has found enthusiastic users among nonarchivists, including independent media producers and archives educators, as well as archivists who are new to managing digital video content.

The Award Committee noted that the guide was a “valuable contribution to the field of digital preservation” and an “example of what a good online resource should be.”

Established in 1993, past recipients of the Preservation Publication Award include Aligning National Approaches to Digital Preservation and Geospatial Multistate Archive and Preservation Partnership (GeoMAPP) Best Practices for Archival Processing for Geospatial Datasets.