SAN DIEGO — Lambda Archives of San Diego (LASD) has announced that it has been accepted into the California Audiovisual Preservation Project (CAVPP). CAVPP is a partnership of 75 libraries and museums developing a database of audiovisual materials documenting California history. The project aims to take a sampling of media from diverse institutions, digitize them, and make them freely accessible through the California Light and Sound Collection on the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/californialightandsound).
Fifty of Lambda Archives’ audiovisual recordings will be professionally digitized and added to the online collections in the summer of 2014. LASD carefully selected a diverse sampling of recordings to represent San Diego’s LGBT history and to showcase the variety of the audiovisual holdings of Lambda Archives. Recordings selected date from the 1970s to mid 1990s and include: samplings from San Diego’s first lesbian and gay radio program, footage from San Diego Pride, performances and community events, oral histories from Lesbian History Project and Queer Artists Project, interviews and lectures by early local LGBT pioneers and much more.
LASD Archivist Kelly Revak stated, “We hope that inclusion in this statewide program will raise awareness of the types of hidden resources available at the Archive, as well as the need to digitize the rest of the collection for preservation and ease of access.” Audiovisual formats such as 8mm audio tape reels, audio cassettes, and VHS tapes are fragile and rapidly becoming obsolete. To preserve the content of the tapes they must be digitized before the film disintegrates. The fifty recordings to be included in the California Audiovisual Preservation Project are a small sampling of the thousands of tapes preserved at Lambda Archives.
LASD has already begun digitizing some of its other fragile visual holdings. The Archive is currently in its third year of a massive photograph digitization effort, made possible by the California Institute of Contemporary Arts. Over 3,000 digitized photos can be viewed at http://www.flickr.com/lambdaarchives/sets with more added daily. The procedures and standards developed in the course of the Photograph Digitization Project will lay the groundwork for future digitization efforts at LASD.
