In "The VHS Legacy Can Be Saved, But Will It?" Peter Monaghan discusses the challenges of preserving VHS tapes. As a medium, they are physically hard to preserve, and working VHS machines are equally hard to find. Besides the physical, archivists have to face myriad copyright issues, and ensure anything they convert from VHS to another format is completely inaccessible to buy at a reasonable price in any other format. Once they do the copyright research and decide they can copy a tape, a good copy requires the proper equipment and software—but more importantly, time, as someone has to watch the tape and look for problems while it is being converted. In short, it seems like a lot of effort and cost for little reward.
I find myself wondering how many people use VHS audio-visual collections anyway. I once wrote a paper using US Army training and public relations film as my main primary sources; however, that was from digitized film reels held in the public domain by the US National Archives. I also took a Latin America through film class, but all the films we used were already on DVD. However, I feel like I am more an exception than the norm, and while I appreciated being able to use those resources, I imagine it is hard for archivists to justify the cost and time required to convert or preserve VHS tapes when the majority of users probably won’t use them. Perhaps it would be better for a library or archive specializing in film to collect and copy tapes from smaller archives that don’t have the resources or desire to preserve them. In any case, this article brings up the same issue of limited resources I keep noticing over and over again. It’s regrettable archivists have to decide beetween what to save and what to discard
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