Audio, Video, and Film Archives Inventory

1890s Baseball Team

The Texas A&M University Archives identified roughly 7,000 audio, video, and film objects within its holdings, with many degrading or in obsolete formats. Most are currently unusable assets, locked into a form in which they are neither preservable nor easily accessible, with little to no description, rendering them undiscoverable. A large percentage of these items are highly valued for their historical value and for research, yet at the present time, the Archives does not have the resources to preserve them. The Friends provided funding in 2023 to enable the Special Collections and Archives Division to engage student interns over the course of three semesters to conduct a large-scale inventory and preliminary conservation assessment of the audio, video, and film within the University Archives. The inventory project will position the Archives to seek digitization funds, resulting in successful long-term preservation of its media holdings and improve access to these items to both researchers and the community.