Digital Collection Stewardship

The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) is Australia’s leading audiovisual archive and is the steward of the national audiovisual collection consisting of 2.3 million items of film, broadcast and sound works and their associated documents and artefacts. In no other type of cultural collecting institution does technology play such a major role as it does in managing the NFSA’s digital collection. Currently the digital collection comprises of 511,797 digital items totaling 575 terabytes. Keeping pace with creators and the industry, the NFSA has modelled an end-to end workflow from acquisition through to preservation and access. It has built a digital collection infrastructure, system and network that manages both its born-digital and digitised works in an integrated manner within its collection management system where the catalogue record represents the lynch-pin to holistic audiovisual collection management. This conference paper will draw on the audiovisual leadership of the NFSA as a case study of digital collection stewardship that successfully supports and manages Australia’s national audiovisual digital collection and ensures that the NFSA can sustainably meet its legal mandate.