The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded Chicago Film Archives a $10,000 grant for the project “Creating a Plan for the Storage, Preservation and Maintenance of CFA’s Digital Assets” as part of their Preservation Assistance Grants for Smaller Institutions program.
This grant will support research, consultation, analysis, and the creation of a Digital Preservation Action Plan. The Plan will consider the ever-changing technological environment, CFA’s heightened digital output resulting from its recently upgraded digitization suite, CFA’s mandate to provide the public broad and flexible access to these materials, and CFA’s capacity to maintain the system into the near and mid future.
CFA’s considerable assets include both digital iterations of CFA’s analog films and videos and born-digital works that include commissioned video art, interviews, and oral histories. The resulting action plan will outline specific steps that CFA will take to best advance the effective storage, preservation and maintenance of its digital assets.
CFA also plans to share a version of this Digital Preservation Action Plan with other smaller independent archives that maintain digital assets.
We are looking forward to working on this project, and thank the NEH for their support!
