The National Library of Korea is proud to introduce the 5th issue of "The Issue Paper" series entitled “The Preservation Strategy for Audiovisual Materials in the era of New Media”. This report aims to propose a long-term preservation strategy for audiovisual materials in the fast transforming digital environment.

The National Library of Korea's audio visual collection contains about 840,000 items ranging from LPs released in the 1950’s to modern digital files. Some cases of the original formats are in real danger of losing them due to oxidization and discontinuation of playback devices.

The NLK has been digitizing analog audio visual materials for many years for preservation and sustainable usage. A successful pilot project to develop automated technical metadata extraction software from digitized audiovisual files was completed earlier this year, and now we are trying to apply this program to the general preservation process.

In this paper, the detailed process of digitizing AV materials and various considerations in each phase will be explained. Furthermore, a long-term strategy to preserve digital content files with technical metadata which are extracted from automation software will be discussed.

“The rapid change of media format has been a very challenging issue not only for libraries but also for all institutions including archives and museums. This report is just the first step toward solving long-pending troubles in AV materials preservation. The NLK is working toward developing universal preservation system for various AV formats.” said the president of the NLK.

"The Issue Paper", launched in January 2021, is a research report series by the NLK experts. It covers trending policy issues, brand new technologies and best practices in the library field. Full-text of all issues are available at NLK homepage www.nl.go.kr for everyone.