Preservation & Migration Seminar 2026

Millions of 16mm film reels hold our shared visual history — and they are at risk.Until now, digitization has been constrained by complexity, cost, and lack of scalability.This session presents a new approach to film digitization through a practical demonstration.

At the core is a simple principle: True-to-source digitization — no alterations, no hidden processing, no compromises.

The session shows how institutions can move from slow, specialist-driven scanning to standardized, high-throughput digitization workflows, and how this enables the establishment of scalable internal capabilities.It is structured around three core dimensions:
 • Physical & digital capture: How analog film is transformed into a digital signal — from illumination and transport, through optics, to sensor capture — and the key parameters that define quality (resolution, dynamic range, bit depth)
 • Workflow & productionHow consistent, repeatable workflows enable reliable, preservation-grade digitization at scale 
 • Organizational model & scalingA community-based model for organizing, implementing, and scaling digitization within institutions — enabling internal capability, control, and long-term sustainability

The session draws on experience from digitizing more than 250,000 film reels in collaboration with leading broadcast archives.

This workflow demonstration closely follows the best practices and recommended procedures of leading archivists and preservationists. From tape handling to digital output formats, from respect and care of the existing metadata to preserving the images as originally created, the SAMMA system workflow process removes a significant portion of the technical load, allowing operators to focus on the successful migration, metadata enrichment, and preservation of the videotapes they hold.

This demonstration will show the core stages of a digital preservation workflow: identification, validation, and characterisation. Using CloudViPER [5], a browser-based virtual environment pre-loaded with open-source preservation tools, we will show practical use with a curated sample corpus to demonstrate how these stages connect to form a coherent preservation workflow.

Aligned with the themes of the FIAT/IFTA Preservation & Migration Commission (PMC), our demonstration emphasizes preservation formats, preservation of metadata, and use of the OAIS model, using industry-standard tools and showing how these tools can be used together into automated policy-driven workflows.Making use of the OPF Reference Workflow [1] and frameworks such as the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation [2], we will demonstrate DROID and JHOVE for validation and MediaInfo for characterisation, showing attendees not just how to run the tools, but how to interpret the results and make their preservation decisions.

Digital preservation workflows typically begin with understanding what digital objects contain, whether they are valid, and what their significant properties are. These fundamental questions - addressed through identification, validation, and characterization - form the foundation of any preservation strategy. Frameworks like the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation and OAIS Reference Model [3] describe what capabilities organizations need; this workshop shows how to implement them with practical tools.The Open Preservation Foundation (OPF) has developed a Reference Workflow [1] that maps common preservation activities to the pre-ingest and ingest stages of the OAIS [3] model. This workshop operationalizes that workflow, giving participants practical experience with the open-source tools that implement each stage - and crucially, how to interpret results to inform preservation decisions.Building digital preservation communities requires overcoming barriers to accessing specialized tools. CloudViPER addresses this by providing a fully configured virtual environment accessible through any web browser, available for teaching or digital preservation. Participants can focus on learning the workflow and sharing experiences rather than troubleshooting installation issues. The small group format enables rich peer learning and discussion of real-world challenges - we expect and will encourage subject matter experts to be among the participants, and their contributions enrich the workshop for everyone.

Our demonstration aims to:
- Introduce the OPF Reference Workflow as a practical framework for digital preservation
- Display format Identification as a media file (using FIDO or DROID) [4]
- Establish Validation techniques 
- Explore characterization and metadata extraction 
- Demonstrate how the tools can be chained together into automated workflows

This demonstration is ideal for participants across all experience levels, from newcomers to digital preservation to practitioners, managers, and educators. 

Our demonstration will provide an easy-to-follow introduction to digital preservation workflows, following the FIAT/IFTA theme of showing how to protect audiovisual content longevity and the OAIS model.Attendees will leave with access to further learning resources and a practical understanding of how open-source tools can support their preservation needs.

References
[1] Open Preservation Foundation, "OPF Reference Workflow," [Online]. Available: https://openpreservation.org/resources/opf-reference-workflow/.[2] N. L. o. D. P. W. Group, "Levels of Digital Preservation V2.0," [Online]. Available: https://osf.io/2mkwx/.[3] The Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems, "Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS)," [Online]. Available: https://public.ccsds.org/Pubs/650x0m2.pdf .[4] Open Preservation Foundation, "Tools - Open Preservation Foundation," [Online]. Available: https://openpreservation.org/tools/ .[5] Open Preservation Foundation, "CloudViPER1 Release,"[Online]. Available: https://openpreservation.org/tools/cloudviper/