2020 in brief: digitisation

… in figures

In 2020, we converted 44,662 carriers into sustainable file formats and added them to our digital archive. This amounts to around 7% of the total number of carriers we are currently familiar with, and exceeds the historic milestone of half a million for the total number of converted carriers! We have future-proofed almost 515,000 or 80.68% of the carriers we are aware of.

We have currently safeguarded over 80% of the carriers known to us, but this total remains liable to change. Our content partners are continuing to acquire audiovisual media as part of their core business, and we ourselves are still welcoming new content partners every year.

… in digitisation projects

Our digitisation projects suffered some delays in 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic. After all, we do not run these projects on our own. Our content partners always register all carriers to be digitised in advance before we commission an external digitisation company to digitise them one format at a time. Bundling materials across sectors and organisations ensures we can benefit from economies of scale, improved efficiency and high quality.

We completed three digitisation projects in 2020, which we highlight below. Our other digitisation projects carried on as normal, such as the migration of Digital Betacam and Betacam SX, and of DV, DVCAM and DVCPRO cassettes. Ready to have a closer look at our completed projects?

The world came to a standstill in 2020, and this had a big impact on our ability to transport carriers to digitisation companies. The only project that didn’t suffer any delays was the digitisation of the masterpiece collection ‘The White Fathers Film Collection’. This collection from KADOC (Documentation and Research Centre on Religion Culture and Society from KU Leuven) arrived at the British digitisation company R3Store Studios before the Covid-19 pandemic struck. They were therefore able to fully focus on digitising more than 200 film objects from us as the pandemic meant they had no other work. The collection was completed on schedule in the first half of 2020.

After three years, the digitisation of vinyl and shellac records was also completed. These fragile records were hugely popular in the 1930s to 1950s when they were used for recording commercial musical (shellac) and radio broadcasts (vinyl). Gecko and VRT digitised 47,600 shellac and vinyl records in total. Here’s one unique gem we discovered in 2021: the Reburial of Paul van Ostaijen (in Dutch).

Finally, the production phase of the digital transfer of optical discs (audio CD and video DVD) started in 2020 as planned, and was also completed in the same year. Next steps for these discs? In 2021 we’re following up with the aftercare and tying up any final loose ends. This includes processing metadata from discs that could not be converted, for example, and splitting audio content into individual tracks in order to process and properly archive all the files. A final report will follow at a later stage.

… in digital intake

In 2020, 66 content partners fed parts of their digital collections into our archive system. The fact that a file is digital is no guarantee that it will be stored sustainably, after all, which is why meemoo doesn’t neglect these file types. We welcome born-digital content and content that has already been digitised by someone else into our archive system via digital intake, and 2.04 PB flowed into the meemoo archive system this way in 2020.

Behind the scenes, in 2020 we also worked hard on a new approach to digital entry routes - improving our tooling in the process so that we can start to scale up from the end of 2021. We also arranged digital intake routes for five additional content partners in 2020: CAMPO, deSingel, the Land van Dendermonde heritage body, Liberas and SBS Belgium can now all get on with safeguarding their born-digital files.

… in other projects