AMIA 2024

The Smithsonian’s Audiovisual Media Preservation Initiative (AVMPI) is a pan-institutional, centralized resource that supports the needs of individual Smithsonian units to preserve and provide access to audiovisual collections. AVMPI has focused on enhancing current in-house transfer capacity for 8mm “small gauge” video formats: Video8, Hi8, and Digital8. However, we observed a noticeable lack of published standards for these amateur formats and preferred to not only rely on “anecdata”, or anecdotal evidence shared among trusted professional peers. Therefore, AVMPI set forth conducting analysis on 8mm video assets to investigate the best way to digitally transfer these formats. Through this poster, we will share our results and how we used them to transfer unique oral histories of prominent figures at Tuskegee University discussing the history of African American Land Grant Colleges (from the National Museum of American History Archive Center collections).