Athletic Archive Digital Preservation File Formats: Master Files, Access Copies, and Migration
Athletic archive digital preservation file formats determine whether a school’s historical photographs, rosters, video recordings, audio files, and statistical records remain usable in twenty years or silently become unreadable. Choosing the right formats at the moment a file is created — or at the moment a physical item is digitized — is one of the highest-leverage decisions an athletic department or archive committee can make, because correcting a poor format choice later is far more expensive than getting it right the first time.
Read More
Athletic Archive File Naming Conventions: A Standard for Photos, Rosters, Video, and Records
Athletic archive file naming conventions are the structured rules that govern how schools label digital files — photographs, rosters, video recordings, and record evidence — so that any staff member, committee volunteer, or future archivist can locate, identify, and use a file without help from whoever created it. Without a convention, even a small athletic archive becomes disorganized quickly: a folder of images named IMG_4872 through IMG_5031 is functionally unsearchable, a roster spreadsheet saved as “final-FINAL2-USE-THIS.xlsx” is a liability waiting to surface, and a state championship video file with no year or sport in its name may as well not exist when a hall-of-fame committee forms twenty years later.
Read More
