Many [homemade movies] end up in landfills, as people die, family homes are emptied and relatives, for whom the films may be meaningless, throw them out.
Corporate archives are also at risk. Earlier this month, fire destroyed nearly four decades' worth of film and video footage in Ottawa's CJOH newsroom; it was a devastating loss, not just for the media organization but also for Canadian history. It was made even more poignant by the fact that long-time news anchor Max Keeping is retiring, and had hoped to take his archive of memories stored at CJOH.
An astounding 80 per cent of the world's film and video holdings could be gone by 2015, predicts Matthew White, a founder of the United Nations-led group Archives at Risk, which has advocated for the digitization and preservation of film archives worldwide.
THE MONEY needs to surface or the imagery will disappear," he writes in his essay "Film & video archives: Very much at risk."
While Gone with the Wind will always be around, he says, films documenting regional culture are at risk of vanishing.
Not only is there the threat of destruction, as in Ottawa, or the garbage can, but film, if improperly stored, deteriorates into what is known as "vinegar syndrome." Video offers its own problems: Many of the technologies used to view 3/4-inch and 2-inch tape became obsolete long ago, and archives no longer have the space to store equipment. The content becomes inaccessible.
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