£1,000 of Free Archiving for 10 UK Universities

All around the world, important history is trapped on decaying vintage formats. So, we’ve decided to help.

As part of a new archival initiative, we're offering £1,000 of free digitisation to ten UK universities, to help safeguard important recordings before it's too late.

From old tapes, cine reels and cassettes to reel to reel audio; across the UK, universities hold vast collections of recordings that risk being lost to time. Whether it's rare oral histories, field research, student theatre, or forgotten radio shows, these archives are at risk on the analogue formats they’re stored on. Never mind the fact it’s a pain to retrieve and play them, and not to mention the costs involved in storing them.

We’re Digital Converters - the UK's leading specialists in analogue-to-digital media conversion. Every year, we convert thousands of hours of footage and sound from obsolete formats into modern, high-quality digital files. We’ve worked with the UK Government, The University of Oxford, Bentley cars, Stella McCartney as well as many museums, councils, national archives and of course families across the country, preserving everything from 16mm documentary footage to decades-old demo tapes.

Now, we want to give something back.

Everyone on our team has benefited from higher education in one way or another, and we’re passionate about supporting the institutions that shaped us. So this offer is a small thank you, and a way of using our skills to help preserve some of the UK's lesser-seen cultural artefacts for future generations.

How To Apply

If you work at a UK university and you're interested in having your archives digitised, we’d love to hear from you.

We’re asking applicants to fill out a short form explaining what they'd like to digitise and why. The offer is open to University archives big or small - just click the link below to apply.

CLICK HERE TO APPLY

What’s Included?

Each selected university will receive up to £1,000 worth of digitisation. That could cover a selection of formats, such as:

• Cine Film formats like 8mm, Super 8, 16mm

• Videotapes like VHS, Betamax, MiniDV, Video8, Hi8

• Audio formats like cassette tapes, reel-to-reel, vinyl

We’ll provide the finished files as digital files on our secure online cloud storage for you to download, and we can also offer your digitised media on USBs or DVDs if preferred.

Sharing The Outcome

We want this campaign to raise awareness about the value of digitising analogue collections – so as part of the initiative, we’re asking each participating university to work with us on a short feature or blog post for their website. That might include a clip or image from the material, a bit of context about its origins, and a link back to this campaign (this blog post) so others can learn about it and sign-up. We can help you produce the article if you are short on time!

If you’re interested in applying – or know someone at a university who might be – [fill out the form here] or get in touch with us directly.

Let’s save something worth saving.

Sean & Mark Parle,

Digital Converters.