Below is a curated list of online resources from around the web that our member institutions have found useful for their museum, archives, and library work.
General preservation
- The Preservation Self-Assessment Program – a resource with guides for identification of items and materials and evaluating materials, storage/exhibit environments, and institutional policies.
- The National Park Service Conserve-o-Grams – short, focused leaflets on nearly every imaginable topic in museum and archives conservation and preservation.
- The Northeast Document Conservation Center has many free resources, most particularly their “preservation leaflets”.
- The Image Permanence Institute has information on the identification and preservation of photographic images, as well as an extremely useful temperature/humidity/dew point calculator.
Preservation and digitization of AV media
- The ARSC Guide to Audio Preservation – probably the most recent, authoritative, and comprehensive introduction to the preservation of audio media, produced by the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, which is itself a great resource (particularly its email listserv).
- Magnetic Tape Storage and Handling: A Guide for Libraries and Archives
- Sound Directions: Best Practices for Audio Preservation – slightly dated, but still a very good intro to professional-level audio digitization workflows and metadata.
- Richard Hess, “Tape degradation factors and challenges in predicting tape life,” ARSC Journal 39.2 (2008), 270-274.
- The AV Artifact Atlas – a comprehensive set of examples of problematic audio and video playback, so that you can learn what the correct name of that “glitch” is.