Western Front

Published purpose

In this project, Western Front Media Archive will address a need for better long-term preservation of digital assets representing important figures and events in Canadian independent art production. It will accomplish this by way of a technology upgrade, a migration, and strengthening the organization’s digital preservation capacity. The organization will prioritize the transfer of content from at-risk media formats to digital formats, informed by archival best practices. A move from Linear Tape Open (LTO)-5 format to LTO-8 format will offer possibilities for duplicate off-site storage for over 5,000 photographic files, 500 moving image files, and 500 audio files. After one year, the organization will have a fully migrated archive of verified, accessible digital assets, a significantly improved long-term storage capacity, and enhanced organizational knowledge of archival best practices.