The National Film and Sound Archive and National Library of Australia will share in $47 million of federal funding to further their efforts maintaining and growing their digital collections.

The Archive will receive $41.9 million to digitise their extensive audio-visual collection, while $5.7 million will go toward the maintenance and development of the Library’s Trove website.

The funding will allow the Archive to digitise and preserve around 240,000 known at-risk audio-visual collection items held by these institutions.

They received a federal funding boost in 2020 of $5.5 million over four years to kickstart a critical project to digitise some of the NFSA’s audio and video magnetic tape collection to the highest archival standards.

This new funding extends that work to support the digitisation of all known at-risk audio-visual material held in the Archive collection and in the collections of several other institutions.

Archive CEO, Patrick McIntyre, said the boost in funding will allow them to get ahead of the risks of obsolete playback equipment and deteriorating tape formats.

“The stories and memories these materials contain provide us with an immediate connection to our lived past, as well as insights into our national character and where we might be heading. And audiovisual media keep these stories alive in uniquely vital and moving ways,” he said.

Archive Head of Collection, Jacqui Uhlmann, says decades of news and popular culture remains in analogue formats that the team is working hard to digitise.

“This is a major investment in our future, ensuring we can save thousands of hours of radio, television and film, before it becomes unplayable,” she said.

“We look forward to collaborating with other cultural institutions and establishing workflows to support large-scale digitisation.”

Trove receives ’30 million visits per year’

The funding of $5.7 million to the Library will further support Trove operations to 30 June 2023, and allow for technical enhancements to be made to ensure the security and reliability of the website.

Trove, launched in 2009, provides online access to more than 6 billion items of Australian and online resources from the Library’s own digital collections and of the many hundreds of partnering organisations.

It has since become an extremely popular, comprehensive cultural websites in Australia, receiving approximately 30 million visits each year.

“Trove provides easy access to important cultural material from a digital first, always accessible online database,” said Commonwealth Minister for Communications, Urban Infrastructure, Cities and the Arts, Paul Fletcher.

Senator for the ACT, Zed Seselja, said Canberra’s national institutions play “an important role” in Canberra’s local economy by attracting “millions of visitors a year” and in turn supporting the local tourism and hospitality sectors.

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