Echoes from the Archive: Why Preserving Our Past is Crucial to Building Our Future
In a quiet corner of the archival world, amid shelves lined with ageing reels, brittle shellac discs, and magnetic tapes, history is being rescued—one recording at a time. This isn’t happening in a vast museum or a national archive, but in a facility tucked away from the public eye: George Blood LP, one of the leading players in preserving endangered audiovisual media.
What’s happening there is far more than a technical process. It’s a battle against time, decay, and perhaps most insidiously, legal and economic systems that often work against the public interest in preservation and access.
Inside George Blood LP: Guardians of Fragile Memory
Visiting George Blood LP feels more like entering a time capsule than a studio. The hum of analogue machinery—some lovingly kept running for decades—underscores the sense of urgency. Audiovisual media, unlike printed text, don’t just record facts: they preserve the nuance of voice, the emotion of performance, and the richness of lived experience. But they’re also far more fragile.
George Blood LP digitises media formats long abandoned by the commercial market: 78 rpm discs, cassette tapes, film reels, and early digital files. Their mission is straightforward: preserve the sound, motion, and files of history. Yet the fact that such a commercial entity exists at all reveals a deeper truth: public institutions can’t keep up. Many archives lack the funding, equipment, or technical expertise to manage the immense task of saving obsolete formats before they vanish for good.
This is where public-private partnerships, and broader national strategies, become critical. We need a system that treats preservation not as a luxury, but as infrastructure.
Cultural Heritage at Risk
Why does this matter? Because audiovisual archives are our collective memory. These aren’t just relics for enthusiasts: they’re fundamental resources for education, identity, and social cohesion.
Unlike text, audiovisual records capture tone, dialect, and emotion. They document community rituals, grassroots movements, indigenous languages, forgotten musicians, and everyday lives. And yet, a staggering 80% of global audiovisual collections may not be adequately preserved.
Digitisation is the first step toward both saving and opening access to these resources. Physical formats, whether it’s magnetic tape or film, deteriorate. Digitising them not only halts physical decay but also allows these materials to be shared far beyond their storage shelves. UNESCO and other bodies emphasise that access and preservation must go hand in hand.
However, even digital formats aren’t inherently safe. Digital files degrade, formats go obsolete, and storage systems become unsupported. Preservation, then, isn’t a one-off fix. It’s an ongoing process, requiring constant migration, infrastructure, and expertise.
Technology: Both Liberator and Disruptor
The history of recorded media is a history of change. From Edison’s phonograph to compact discs, from VHS to streaming, each innovation reshaped how we create, distribute, and consume culture.
In the music industry, technologies like digital audio workstations (DAWs) and MP3s lowered entry barriers, enabling more independent artists to create and distribute work. In film, digital cinematography and computer-generated imagery (CGI) revolutionised production and opened up new visual frontiers.
But these same changes also disrupted revenue models, displaced jobs, and reshaped industries. AI is the latest wave in this long pattern of creative destruction. It’s already capable of generating music, enhancing videos, and replicating voices, and it’s raising new anxieties across sectors.
Historically, though, technological disruption has often led to new forms of work, not just job loss. What’s required now is thoughtful policy and support for adaptation. We need to prepare for the shifts AI will bring, not just panic about them.
AI and Archives: A Powerful Partnership?
Far from being just a threat, AI holds great potential for transforming how we engage with cultural memory. In the archival world, AI can already:
- Transcribe audio from fragile recordings via Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)
- Digitally recognise and tag entities like people or locations in video and image content
- Generate metadata at scale for otherwise “dark” collections
- Identify content risk, such as sensitive information needing redaction
- Restore degraded media through machine learning tools
AI’s ability to unlock content that’s otherwise inaccessible, especially vast audiovisual archives, is a game-changer. Semantic search and smart recommendations can help researchers and the public discover patterns and connections that were invisible before.
But there’s a catch: AI is only as good as the quality of the data it works on. Poor digitisation or lack of contextual information reduces its usefulness. Moreover, if AI is used to restrict access (e.g., automated copyright enforcement), it could undermine the very openness it enables.
Ultimately, AI should be a tool for archivists, not a replacement. Human expertise remains essential for interpreting context, curating meaning, and ensuring ethical use.
When Copyright Clashes with Culture: The Great 78 Project Lawsuit
This tension between access and restriction is now playing out in court, in a case that could shape the future of cultural preservation.
The Great 78 Project—a collaboration between the Internet Archive and George Blood LP—aims to digitise hundreds of thousands of 78 rpm records, mainly from the early 20th century. These records are fragile, obscure, and rarely available through commercial channels.
Yet, major record labels have sued, alleging mass copyright infringement.
The Internet Archive counters that their aim is non-commercial: to preserve deteriorating media and provide research access. These recordings are a public good, they argue, and digitising them qualifies as fair use under copyright law.
But the lawsuit could be catastrophic. The labels seek statutory damages of up to $150,000 per track, potentially exceeding $600 million: enough to threaten the very existence of the Internet Archive.This case reveals a legal system out of balance. While digitising to preserve and share is punished, letting cultural assets decay carries no penalty. Worse, there are indirect financial incentives for commercial entities to destroy obsolete media, such as tax deductions for writing off inventory.
A System Out of Sync with the Public Good
At its core, this is about misalignment. Copyright was designed to incentivise the creation of new works by granting limited monopolies, “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” “But that logic breaks down when applied to older, obscure works with no commercial life and whose creators are long gone.
These works, although neglected by the market, remain culturally vital. They provide insights into identity, community, and creativity, especially for marginalised groups rarely represented in mainstream media.
Yet the threat of litigation discourages libraries, archives, and non-profits from engaging in preservation and access. Fear of massive lawsuits leads to dark archives—collections that are digitised but hidden from view.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Charting a Better Future
If we want to preserve our collective memory, we need more than passion and technology. We need legal and economic systems that support it. That means:
- Copyright reform to protect preservation activities and allow reasonable access
- Funding models that recognise archives as public infrastructure
- Policies for AI development that align with heritage goals
- Collaboration between cultural institutions, technologists, and lawmakers
Without this, we risk a future where only what’s profitable survives, and everything else quietly disappears.
Preserving our past is not just about nostalgia. It’s about equity, memory, and democracy. It’s about ensuring that future generations can hear the voices of the past: not just the ones that sold the most records, but the ones that told the richest, most human stories.
Written by Caroline De Cock, LL.M. , Head of Research.
Explore more:
- 🧠 George Blood LP – Audio/Visual Preservation Services
- 🎶 The Great 78 Project – Internet Archive
- ⚖️ Internet Archive’s Response to the Copyright Lawsuit
- 🌍 UNESCO: World Day for Audiovisual Heritage
Picture collage
April 30, 2025
