Recordings at Risk is a national regranting program administered by CLIR to support the preservation of rare and unique audio and audiovisual content of high scholarly value through digital reformatting. Generously funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the program will run four competitions from January 2017 to September 2018 and will award a total of $2.3 million. Awards from the open competitions range from $10,000 to $50,000 and cover costs of preservation reformatting for audio and/or audiovisual content by qualified external service providers.
Recordings at Risk encourages professionals who may be constrained by limited resources and/or technical expertise to take action against the threats of degradation and obsolescence. The program aims to help institutions identify priorities and develop practical strategies for digital reformatting, build relationships with partners, and raise awareness of best practices.
As its name suggests, Recordings at Risk prioritizes long-term preservation of content over immediate, comprehensive access. This emphasis differentiates this program from CLIR’s larger and broader digitization initiative, Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives. There are two primary reasons for this:
- many preservationists estimate only ten to fifteen years before the degradation and obsolescence of physical carriers leads to the permanent loss of audio and audiovisual content; and
- substantial proportions of the content reformatted through Recordings at Risk are likely to remain protected by copyright beyond the usable life-span of their original carriers.
Universities with multiple campuses may count Individual campuses as discrete entities for the purposes of this program. Only one project can be submitted per campus in a single cycle.