Updating an Outdated Media Collection (Or Trying To, Anyway)

When I signed on here, the principal of the school mentioned specifically that they would love some help with the school's video materials collection, which she said was "a little bit dated". Sounds good, says I! I'm actually taking Digital Collections this semester as well, and looking at ways of collecting digital or digitizable media is what I'm up to right now anyway. Plus, kids' movies are fun!

Well, here's what the video materials collection looks like:

As you can see, the vast majority of it is on VHS, with a few DVDs for flavor from the past couple of years. I pretty much expected that, but it was still a little deflating to start digging through. So many materials on depreciated technology, oh my!

After a quick inventory, it looks like the school does still have a good number of active VCRs that are shared between classrooms, although their numbers are dwindling as they slowly die and the school is understandably reluctant to replace such outdated pieces of technology. There are only a few DVD players to be had, though - usually very old ones, often combo DVD/VHS players from the era when that was a big thing - so those classrooms that do want to use DVDs have to jockey for them anyway.

This was such a big project that I went back to the principal, as site supervisor, to ask exactly what she actually wanted, because "can you update this" is a pretty vague directive. After talking to her, she explained that the school would like an inventory of the video media holdings, after which it would be helpful to have a list of suggestions for which materials could or should be updated to DVD first, as well as which ones would be cost-effective. She also asked for an additional list of materials that maybe could be replaced with something new and better instead of just updated to new media storage, although I think I may want to go at this one step at a time and leave that until later.

This project looks like it might be too large for me to effectively complete within the practicum time period, but I can at least get a plan in place for it that someone else could keep working on. My tentative outline-of-an-outline, for the moment, is:

• Perform an inventory of the current VHS and DVD holdings for the library (using the catalogue as a starting point, but I'll still probably have to go through by hand to make sure that's accurate).
• Identify core materials - for example, the library's collection of Disney films, or the historical religious stories series - that the library definitely needs to keep, with input from the faculty about which materials are used most for lesson plans.
• Identify outdated or offensive materials - for example, a collection on Native American peoples with offensive terminology on the box as well as in its content - that could be updated to newer versions or options.
• Research pricing for DVD or digital-only file upgrades to identified materials.
• Research replacement materials for outdated/damaged materials.

I'm not sure how far I'll get on all that, at least without taking extra days outside of work to dig into it, but it's a start!