I have worked with audiovisual preservation in Brazil for almost 15 years, but in 2013 I decided to launch a small consulting firm dedicated exclusively to audiovisual preservation. Most of my clients consist of public or private archival institutions. Even though we already have at present the notion that audiovisual preservation is a vast and complex topic – often multidisciplinary and requiring archival management abilities among other knowledge – I have observed from my practical experience a different kind of scenario; generally that the Brazilian archival institutions are limited to digitization demands; in others words, only the action consisting of the conversion from an analogue carrier to digital data (digitization in the narrow sense). These institutions’ perspective generally does not consider digitization as the beginning of a vast and long term process, so that other related issues are equally not contemplated in this sense – such as formats obsolescence, metadata management, data authenticity, solid access strategies, etc.
This presentation aims to reflect upon the audiovisual preservation scenario of the Brazilian archival institutions from the perspective of an independent professional in the field. The IASA guidelines will be used as a reference, to point out to what extent international standards are – or are not – being followed by those institutions.