Knowyourcarrier.com

Identify audiovisual en photographic media with knowyourcarrier.com

A significant part of our work focuses on images and audio preserved by Flemish arts and cultural heritage institutions, the media and the government. Although this doesn’t mean that there aren’t any gems hidden away in Flemish attics or with other organisations, of course. With knowyourcarrier.com, we want to support our partners and anyone else who wants to sustainably preserve their images and audio. The fact that this handy tool was designed for individuals without any prior knowledge is one of the reasons why it won a prestigious FIAT/IFTA award for Excellence in Media Preservation.

Meemoo regularly receives questions from individuals about their audiovisual and photographic media: what is it? Which organisation can help me with it? What’s the best way to preserve it? In order to answer these questions as easily as possible, we combined input from experts and our knowledge from various digitisation projects, and arranged it in a handy decision tree.

The knowyourcarrier.com website is structured around three questions:

1. How do I identify audiovisual or photographic media?

A whole host of audiovisual and photographic carriers have been developed in the past – both analogue and digital. This website uses a few specific questions to help you identify what you’ve got: Hi8, VHS or maybe even a carte de visite, roll film or Betacam. You can find information about the most common media and various carriers we’ve had experience of in our digitisation projects.

2. Does my audiovisual or photographic content have any cultural heritage value?

We ask a few targeted questions and use examples to help find an answer to this question. Perhaps your content has some historical or scientific significance? If this is the case, we’ll refer you to a cultural heritage institution that might want to include it in their collection. You never know… it could even end up in one of meemoo’s digitisation projects.

3. How should I preserve my audiovisual or photographic content and can I digitise it?

At knowyourcarrier.com, you can find answers to questions such as: should I store my film reel horizontally or vertically? Do I need to take temperature and humidity into account when deciding where to store my audio cassettes? Should I open the paper wrapping of my photographic media (no, don't do it)?

We provide tips for the best way to preserve your audiovisual and photgraphic content and help interested parties digitise their carriers. We’ve even published an overview of digitisation companies and a template to help ask them the right questions.

Ready to find some answers?

Read more.

Knowyourcarrier.com is an initiative that was set up by meemoo, Flemish Institute for Archives. We launched the project for audiovisual carriers in 2018, and then added photographic carriers to the website and gave the platform a fresh new look in 2023. This expansion and freshening up is part of the Flemish Government’s Resilience Recovery Plan, and was made possible with support from the European Regional Development Fund.