View source for Films and documentaries about archiving

This is a list of '''films and documentaries about archiving'''. Not only about professional archiving, but also amateur efforts by anonymous people, collectors of vinyls, VHS tapes or prolific photographers. This page also includes documentaries about preservation and restoration of works by libraries and museums specialist departments, and book digitization projects.

{| class="wikitable sortable plainlinks" style="text-align: center;"
! Image
! Title
! Year
! Director(s)
! Topic(s)
! Language(s)
! Duration
! Summary
|-
| [[File:A free digital library.png|200px]]
| ''[http://www.ted.com/talks/brewster_kahle_builds_a_free_digital_library.html A free digital library]''<br/><small>([https://archive.org/details/dom-26035-brewsterkahlebuildsafreedigita mirror])</small>
| 2007
| Brewster Kahle
| Internet Archive
| English<br/>24 langs. (subs)
| 20 min.
| [[Brewster Kahle]] is building a truly huge digital library -every book ever published, every movie ever released, all the strata of web history... It's all free to the public- unless someone else gets to it first.
|-
| [[File:Adjust your tracking.png|200px]]
| ''[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dcspg0lhDlE Adjust your tracking]''<br/><small>([https://archive.org/details/youtube-Dcspg0lhDlE mirror])</small>
| 2013
| Dan M. Kinem<br/>Levi Peretic
| VHS tapes
| English
| 84 min.
| [http://www.adjustyourtracking.com/ Adjust Your Tracking: The Untold Story of the VHS Collector]. A documentary capturing the modern day VHS culture and VHS collectors. (NSFW-ish)
|-
| [[File:Internet Archive by Deepspeed media.png|200px]]
| ''[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ec_-fgy3EGY Archive]''<br/><small>([https://archive.org/details/youtube-ec_-fgy3EGY mirror])</small>
| 2012
| Jonathan Minard
| Internet Archive
| English
| 12 min.
| Archive is a documentary focused on the future of long-term digital storage, the history of the Internet and attempts to preserve its contents on a massive scale. Part one features Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and his colleagues Robert Miller, director of books, and Alexis Rossi, director of web collections. On a mission to create universal access to all knowledge, the Internet Archive's staff have built the world's largest online library, offering 10 petabytes of archived websites, books, movies, music, and television broadcasts. The video includes a tour of the Internet Archive's headquarters in San Francisco, the book scanning center, and the book storage facilities in Richmond, California.
|-
| [[File:Digital Amnesia.png|200px]]
| ''[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdZxI3nFVJs Digital Amnesia]''<br/><small>([https://archive.org/details/DigitalAmnesiaDocumentary mirror])</small>
| 2014
| Bregtje van der Haak
| Internet Archive
| English<br/>French (subs)<br/>Spanish (subs)
| 49 min.
| Our memory is dissipating. Hard drives only last five years, a webpage is forever changing and there’s no machine left that reads 15-year old floppy disks. Digital data is vulnerable. Yet entire libraries are shredded and lost to budget cuts, because we assume everything can be found online. But is that really true? For the first time in history, we have the technological means to save our entire past, yet it seems to be going up in smoke. Will we suffer from collective amnesia? Featuring [[Brewster Kahle]], [[User:Jscott|Jason Scott]], the [[ArchiveTeam Warrior]] software, and more.
|-
| [[File:Finding Vivian Maier.jpg|200px]]
| ''[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2714900/ Finding Vivian Maier]''
| 2013
| John Maloof<br/>Charlie Siskel
| Photography
| English
| 83 min.
| A documentary on the late Vivian Maier, a nanny whose previously unknown cache of 100,000 photographs earned her a posthumous reputation as one of the most accomplished street photographers.
|-
| [[File:Francisco Boix.png|200px]]
| ''[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-04d60l0-EU Francisco Boix, un fotógrafo en el infierno]''<br/><small>([https://archive.org/details/youtube-_1Bx1L_3nvI mirror])</small>
| 2002
| Llorenç Soler
| Photography
| Spanish
| 56 min.
| This documentary is the story of Francisco Boix, a graphic reporter who was a prisoner and a slave in the nazi concentration camp of Matthausen where he shot lots of pictures which eventually where considered as witness in the judgement of Nuremberg, after Second World War.
|-
| [[File:Google and the World Brain.jpg|200px]]
| ''[https://archive.org/details/GoogleAndTheWorldBrain_201611 Google and the World Brain]''
| 2013
| Ben Lewis
| Libraries
| English
| 83 min.
| The most ambitious project ever conceived on the Internet: [[Google]]'s master plan to scan every book in the world and the people trying to stop them. Google say they are building a library for mankind, but they also have other intentions.
|-
| [[File:La oscura era digital.png|200px]]
| ''[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzQyHLd8jYo La oscura era digital: ¡socorro! ¡estamos despareciendo!]''<br/><small>([https://archive.org/details/youtube-jzQyHLd8jYo mirror])</small>
| 2004
| Jörg Daniel Hissen <br/>Peter Moers
| Digital preservation<br/>Digital Dark Age
| Spanish
| 51 min.
| It analyses the effects of digital obsolescence, destruction of data and digital preservation efforts. It includes interviews to [[Stewart Brand]], founder of [[Long Now Foundation]].
|-
| [[File:Lost Forever.jpg|200px]]
| ''[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TEgrdAlofk Lost Forever]''<br/><small>([https://archive.org/details/youtube-3TEgrdAlofk mirror])</small>
| 2011
| Paul Mariano<br/>Kurt Norton
| Films
| English
| 30 min.
| Reveals the rich and diverse American film heritage and shows us how preservation saves both the cultural heritage and the individual memories.
|-
| [[File:Recorder The Marion Stokes Project.jpg|200px]]
| ''Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project''
| 2018
| Matt Wolf<br/>Kyle Martin
| Television
| English
| 
| Radical Communist, counter-cultural television producer, Apple shareholder, and private archivist Marion Stokes captured three decades of television on her VCR. Her expansive project tore her family apart, but it’s now being digitized by the Internet Archive.
|-
| [[File:Rosetta.jpg|200px]]
| ''[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XPKWyakBl0 Rosetta]''
| 2012
| Scott Oller
| Languages
| English
| 14 min.
| This documentary takes a look at the Long Now Foundation's Rosetta Project, a unique effort to archive all of the world's languages.
|-
| [[File:Saving our sounds.jpg|200px]]
| ''[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcsTwJ7jRt8 Saving Our Sounds: Preserving Historical Recordings and Music]''
| 2002
| Edward Herrmann
| Music
| English
| 43 min.
| 
|-
| [[File:The man who wanted to classify the world.jpg|200px]]
| ''[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9jgnU3V944 The Man Who Wanted to Classify the World]''
| 2002
| Françoise Levie
| Libraries
| English
| 60 min.
| Paul Otlet was a Belgian who perfected the Dewey Classification system as "the Universal Decimal Classification", in his lifetime alone totalling 17 million index cards of human knowledge. 
|-
| [[File:The race to save 100 years.jpg|200px]]
| ''[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItEZlZBiGZE The Race to Save 100 Years]''<br/><small>([https://archive.org/details/youtube-ItEZlZBiGZE mirror])</small>
| 1997
| Scott Benson
| Films
| English
| 57 min.
| As the documentary points out, 85 percent of all silent pictures are gone forever because of neglect, abuse, and improper storage of original prints. This film stresses the importance of saving these and more recent films as cultural documents that have become part of our shared history. It also takes the viewer through the painstaking process of film restoration, and highlights some of the organizations and individuals who are spear-heading this movement.
|-
| [[File:The World Largest Record Collection.png|200px]]
| ''[https://vimeo.com/1546186 The World's Largest Record Collection]''<br/><small>([https://archive.org/details/vimeo-1546186 mirror])</small>
| 2008
| Sean Dunne
| Music
| English
| 8 min.
| Paul Mawhinney was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA. Over the years he has amassed what has become the world's largest record collection. Due to health issues and a struggling record industry Paul is being forced to sell his collection.
|-
| [[File:Toute la memoire du monde.png|200px]]
| ''[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0RVSZ_yDjs Toute la mémoire du monde]''<br/><small>([https://archive.org/details/youtube-i0RVSZ_yDjs mirror])</small>
| 1956
| Alain Resnais
| Libraries
| French<br/>English (subs)
| 20 min.
| An essay on the potential and the limits of dutifully archived human knowledge, masquerading as a documentary on the organisation of the [[Bibliothèque nationale de France]].
|-
| [[File:Bbc timeshift missing-believed-wiped.jpg|200px]]
| ''[https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xvum24 BBC Timeshift - Missing Believed Wiped]''
| 2003
| Jo Haywood
| Television, Video Tape
| English
| 40 min.
| The history of the BBC's once prevalent, but short-sighted, policy of wholesale disposal of recorded television content, and the efforts to mitigate that loss. 
|}

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