The oldest tapes in the Archive were recorded in 1979, videotape is ephemeral due to its somewhat fragile physical nature, but even more due to format obsolescence. Professional analog recorders are no longer manufactured and as time passes, there will be few, if any, experts who can repair those that still exist. Time is the enemy and these crucial video documents will be lost if action is not taken soon. We have restored and reformatted another 2,761 with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Foundation Video Archive endowment fund as the Beta test site for a robotic preservation system. Plans have been formulated to migrate the entire collection to both preservation and access digital formats and funding raising is underway.
