The National library of Sweden has for many years accepted donations of audiovisual material from organizations, companies and private donors. Usually the contact takes place when an agency is closing down, or an apartment is to be vacated. The audiovisual material is usually quite old, and has been kept on shelves for many years. Sometimes the material has sufficient metadata, but usually just notes on the box. If we think that the proposed material will fill in a gap in our collections, and be beneficial to research in a certain area, we accept the donation.
The situation described has been the rule until the present decade, pieces of historical audiovisual material have survived in sometimes hard conditions: too hot, too cold, too dusty. As the National library has resources in the form of machinery and skilful technicians, the material can be converted into a digital file that will be preserved for the future, the cataloguing staff can get extra metadata from watching or listening to the digital file.
If we look just a bit into the future, the above described scenario will not happen. Almost all audiovisual material today is born digital, if a hard drive is found on a shelf 20 years from now we will probably not be able to access the material, also there is no accessible metadata that will tell us what's on the hard drive.
Most audiovisual content today is saved in the cloud, that is, on the computer servers of international companies. If we are to collect audiovisual material, the rights holders need to be contacted while the material still is accessible.
As the National library’s resources are limited, we have to choose the audiovisual material that we think will be of interest to researchers in the future. An example to illustrate the situation, if a young musician is starting his career today, most of his output: music, blogs, tweets, will be stored on distant servers. If a researcher wants to access the material in the future, it will be very difficult to locate, or in a worst case scenario, lost.
One way to provide future researchers with audiovisual material is to choose digital audiovisual media from certain criteria, and make an agreement with every rights holder. The bonus for the rights holders are that they don't have to worry about safety copying, and that the National library can provide them with access to their own material.
This presentation will show that researchers in the future will only get access to curated examples of audiovisual history because not all historical material on physical carriers are saved and accessible today. A lot has succumbed to material fatigue and been lost.