Preserving Audiovisual Collections with CAW

Through a partnership with Community Archiving Workshop (CAW), a project of the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA), Recollection Wisconsin is working to build capacity for identifying, preserving, and digitizing film, videotape, audiotape and other audiovisual collections. Preservation of these collections is an urgent need.

Audiovisual documents contain the primary records of the history of the 20th and 21st centuries, enabling us to pass down common heritage across generations, however, the moving pictures and radio sounds capturing our collective pasts run the risk of vanishing through decay, or being lost to time as the technology once used to handle them becomes obsolete.UNESCO


Get Help with AV Preservation

Does your organization also face challenges in identifying, preserving and/or digitizing audiovisual collections? We can help!

Creating an accurate inventory of your AV collections is a crucial first step in making decisions about what to preserve and digitize. Use this inventory template and instructions to guide your work:

To learn more about lending kits for film inspection or film scanning, visit the Audiovisual Lending Kit page.


2022-2023: Digital Readiness for Audiovisual Collections

In 2022, CAW received a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) to support the project Assessing and Addressing Digital Readiness for Audiovisual Collections. Recollection Wisconsin and WiLS are partnering with the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) on this project, which was developed in response to the many requests CAW received from partners for support in managing their digital collections.

This work builds on the Digital Readiness Community of Practice developed by WiLS, Recollection Wisconsin, and the Wisconsin Historical Society by adapting it to include digital audiovisual collections. The new survey and documentation will be piloted with twelve CAW partner organizations in four regions: the Midwest, the Southeast, the Southwest, and California. The project will also support a partner-driven Community of Practice – a space in which organizations can support and learn from each other in order to further the mission of becoming better stewards of their collections. 

2019-2021: CAW Regional Training-of-Trainers

From 2019-2021, supported by a grant awarded to AMIA from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), staff from regional partner institutions received hands-on training in the essentials of care and preservation of film, video and audio collections at a Training the Trainers workshop. Regional Training of Trainers programs were also hosted by California Revealed, an initiative of the California State Library, and the Metropolitan Government Archives at the Nashville Public Library in Tennessee.

Regional Partners


With their work interrupted by Covid, regional partners pivoted to apply their learning from the workshop using a variety of approaches that avoided the risk of planned in-person workshops at each partner site. Independent consultant Bronwen Masemann developed three case studies to show how these archives and museums took concrete steps to enhance the preservation of their audiovisual collections:



Institute of Museum and Library Services