Colombia. In the framework of the 12th Radio Biennial that was held in Bogotá, the company Grabando Archivos took the opportunity to bring together international experts in order to analyze the state of Latin America in the digitization of audiovisual archives.
Perla Oliva Rodríguez, PhD in documentation sciences, is one of the professionals who has worked the most for the digitization of content in Latin America. He stressed that his country, Mexico, like Colombia and Brazil, are the ones that have advanced the issue the most in the region from the state side, although he indicated that we are very behind compared to European countries, where they have already digitized 100% of public information.
Engineer Alejandro Ramírez, who has extensive experience in the telecommunications sector, commented that one of the problems of digitization is the cost of both the process and the maintenance of the disks, since they must be replaced every five years to guarantee the preservation of information, but by budget in most cases in Latin America they do it every 10 years, with the risk that means.
For his part, Alejandro Echevarría, a professor and radio expert at the San Martín University in Peru, said that in his country the need to digitize public archives is just beginning to awaken and there is no known initiatives by private media chains.
Another concern of experts is what happens to this material digitized by the state. In theory it should be in public service. But at this point they begin to play aspects such as copyright, which at that time are not clear.
Perla Oliva Rodríguez stressed that a recent study by the Sound and Audiovisual Archive of Australia estimates that due to the obsolescence of the equipment and the lack of spare parts of the reproduction machines, the audiovisual files on tape will be able to be digitized only until 2025.
And that is just one of the concerns of Ramiro Fillippo, manager of Grabando Archivos, because for the old machines there are no new spare parts, so they have searched all over the world for damaged machines to use their spare parts and have even managed to make some specific parts.
In that sense, Alejandro Ramírez commented that 3D printers provide an option for the realization of these spare parts.
