From The Baltimore Sun:
Inside the Baltimore City Archives warehouse, Siobhan Hagan sorts through a wooden crate filled with old film canisters.
It’s a small part of the archives of WJZ television — thousands of reels of film and videotapes from broadcasts dating back decades.
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Hagan, a 32-year-old archivist, is tackling a challenge confronting media organizations across the country: The steady, inexorable deterioration of the film and magnetic tapes that hold history. In 10 to 15 years, preservationists say, some of the oldest videotape will no longer be playable.
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Hagan, founder of the nonprofit Mid-Atlantic Regional Moving Image Archive, has acquired the entirety of the WJZ archives, including more than 25,000 tapes and hundreds of film reels. She is taking inventory of the collection and prioritizing items that need to be digitized soon before they’re lost forever. She has launched a crowdfunding campaign to pay for the long process of preservation.
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