Filmstrip preservation matters
Last Friday, we hosted an international workshop and welcomed archivists from across Europe to Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. Together with these experts from the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, and Ukraine, we discussed key challenges in working with filmstrips from an archival perspective, focusing on metadata, conservation, and digitisation. Our goal: to develop archival best practices that will help make this almost forgotten audiovisual medium more visible and accessible.
The lively discussions showed that filmstrips are a challenging archival object that compels us to fundamentally reconsider the media archive and its blind spots. Taking part were our partners from the German Film Institute & Film Museum, the Museum of English Rural Life, the National Library of Scotland, and Scan2Screen, as well as representatives from the British Film Institute, the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, the Deutsches Historisches Museum, the Deutsche Kinemathek, the Dovzhenko Centre, the Imperial War Museum, the Jörn Napp Image Archive, the Museum of Communication Bern, and the National Archives.
We will publish results and recommendations from these collaborative discussions in 2026
