President and Mrs. James Bryant Conant, right, walk across Harvard Yard at the behest of a film crew, left, for the 1951 March-of-Time newsreel “Invitation to Harvard.” The photograph as well as the newsreel are among the holdings of the Harvard University Archives.

It’s no secret to anyone who has attempted to watch a suddenly-unplayable videotape that sound and visual recordings can be short-lived. They appear to be in fine condition one day and fail the next. The media held across Harvard’s libraries and archives are no exception, and many materials in the University’s audiovisual (AV) collections are rare or unique and important.

Examples abound. Houghton Library’s Woodberry Poetry Room holds a 1941 Harvard Vocarium recording of W. H. Auden reading his poems. Holdings of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies in the Fung Library include a sound disc of Mikhail Gorbachev’s speech “Looking Back on Perestroika,” recorded at Sanders Theatre in 2002. The University Archives holds a videocassette of Harvard’s 1998 convocation honoring Nelson Mandela. Nearly all Harvard libraries hold irreplaceable audiovisual materials, some of which are already difficult to access or will become so in the not-distant future.

To help Harvard’s libraries establish AV preservation priorities, the University Library’s Weissman Preservation Center (WPC) is piloting a web-based survey tool that assesses format and condition and, together with a value rating, establishes preservation priorities.

Development of the pilot is supported by the Harvard University Library, the Harvard College Library, and the Adler Preservation Fund.

According to Jan Merrill-Oldham, Harvard’s Malloy-Rabinowitz Preservation Librarian, “We need to understand the AV universe in Harvard’s libraries and archives, and pinpoint those materials that are likely to be reaching the end of their usefulness as physical objects. Following on our work, librarians, curators, and archivists can identify among them those that are most worthy of being digitized and stored and delivered from the Digital Repository Service (DRS).”

The WPC team elected to develop an AV survey tool designed to fully meet Harvard’s institutional needs. The pilot is a web-based, multi-user software tool, implemented in PHP and JavaScript with a MySQL back end. It employs user access control mechanisms to ensure survey data security and integrity, and supports the use of library-defined tags, context-sensitive web-based help, and search and report generation. It also can be extended to support additional audiovisual formats as they evolve. Software will support the myriad formats found in the Library’s collections, and allow for easy incorporation of new format types as they are discovered. It employs a standardized vocabulary for format attributes and values to ensure the accuracy, consistency, and integrity of survey data across the University.

One of the most exciting aspects of the survey tool design process has been the development of an ANSI/NISO Z39.19 (2005)–compliant taxonomy, a controlled vocabulary implemented in XML that classifies AV objects solely on the basis of their physical characteristics. This constitutes a departure from existing classification systems, which combine physical format with content and use very broad categories to describe physical formats, such as “sound discs” or “videotape.” In contrast, the new taxonomy incorporated here classifies formats to a finer granularity.

The taxonomy also provides an authoritative point of control for the maintenance and extension of the survey tool software, including its user interface and database tables.

The WPC is partnering with the University Archives to develop and test the AV survey. University Archivist Megan Sniffin-Marinoff notes that “the Harvard University Archives has an exceptionally good AV collection. This project will provide a much-needed assessment of the physical needs of these materials and enable us to determine not only how the Archives will preserve the collections but also how we will make them available to the community.”

The project development team includes Jane Hedberg and Elizabeth Walters (WPC), and Ceilyn Boyd (administrative fellow in HUL’s Office for Information Systems and in WPC).  Robin McElheny is leading the University Archives team, with the assistance of Kate Bowers and Colin Lukens. Houghton Library’s Woodberry Poetry Room will be a second early test site. There, Carie McGinnis (Houghton) and Christina Davis (Woodberry Poetry Room) will partner with WPC to implement a survey in FY 2010.

To learn more, contact Jane Hedberg: 5-8596 or This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .