Large-scale film inspection project at Bundesarchiv
INSPECTIONscan at the Federal Archives of Germany - Results after one year of Productive Operation
After just over a year, the project will be celebrating its first million: the first million programme minutes from the German film heritage will have been conservationally examined as part of the project.
Bundesarchiv has the legal mandate to permanently preserve the archive holdings of the Federal Republic of Germany and make them available for use. The film holdings of the Bundesarchiv currently comprise over ten million minutes of programmes on more than one million film reels. This film holding is to be examined for preservation purposes and the results of the analyses are to be stored in online databases.
To this end, the Bundesarchiv procured ten INSPECTIONscan systems with an associated workflow solution from Cube-Tec in 2024 for the professional, so-called physical inspection of its analog film holdings.
The Cube workflow system integrates all work steps and provides the tools for the complex quality management measures. All steps were synchronised with various departments of the Bundesarchiv in order to ensure the best possible use of the inspection reports created.
In the new process, a detailed film inspection report and an MPEG video file are created for each film reel for internal evaluation purposes. The data is prepared and made available directly for import into the BASYS 3-FILM database.
Dirk Förstner, Project Manager Federal Archives of Germany, AT 3 Division:
Documenting the condition of all film reels is a very important project for our audiovisual materials department. The insights gained into the physical state of the film holdings allow us to set priorities and identify particularly fragile materials for early digital preservation.
As a long-term effort, this project will provide a comprehensive overview of the conservation status of our analogue film holdings, enabling us to further develop our existing strategies for safeguarding these valuable archival assets."
Jörg Houpert, Head of Research and Development at Cube-Tec International:
Most people find it difficult to imagine one million reels of film. If we were to splice all the film rolls one after the other, the result would be a length of film that could theoretically be wrapped around the globe eight times. The total weight is around 3,000 tons. Every single working day, we have to digitize and check around 5 million individual images. A truly Herculean task for the German film heritage at Bundesarchiv."
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