Preserving the Walther Barth Collection: An Archival Film Case Study

One of the most fascinating historic motion picture collections at the Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound (TAMIS) is the Walther Barth Film Collection. Barth's unique amateur films depict privileged society and tourism in Germany and the United States over the course of nearly 100 individual films shot between the 1920s and the 1960s. Conserving, preserving, and cataloging this collection has been a long-term project for TAMIS staff since 2007, culminating in a recent grant-funded comprehensive preservation project. TAMIS staff will describe the different phases of this long-term project and show examples of recent state-of-the-art scans of the film.