SAVE - Safeguarding the audiovisual heritage in Saxony

Since 2019, the SLUB Dresden has been involved in the SAVE programme for the preservation, digitisation and provision of historical film, video and sound recordings from Saxony. The Saxon State Ministry of Science, Culture and Tourism supports the programme. In cooperation with the Saxony Film Association, over 100,000 minutes of film, video and sound recordings from the period between 1920 and 2011 have already been digitised and made available to the public.

About SAVE

Since 2019, the Free State of Saxony has been supporting the professional retro-digitisation and public accessibility of audiovisual cultural assets and research documents with Saxon relevance. The analogue film, video and sound media come from a wide variety of sources: from private collections, associations, city archives, libraries and local television stations, as well as from museum collections of national and international significance.

Dr. Ursula Köhler (1921-1995), psychologist at the Technical University of Dresden, speaking in lecture T109 in the studio of the Hygiene Museum ("The importance of play for the healthy development of infants and young children"), ca. 1961. Source: German Hygiene Museum

To this end, SLUB is working together with the Saxony Film Association, which had already launched a pilot phase in 2016 on issues of safeguarding the audiovisual heritage, and is acting as a coordinating body. It plans the respective course of the project, assesses the rights situation and creates public access by entering the digitised media into national catalogues and making them publicly accessible in the SLUB media library and, in the medium term, on sachsen.digital.

The SLUB commissions experienced external service providers to digitize the various materials (magnetic audio tapes, film from 8 mm to 35 mm, self-cutting records, videotapes). With the support of the coordination office, program participants undertake the rights clearance, the content cataloging of the sources, and the organization of the preservation of the original source materials. Since 2016, approximately 100,000 minutes of recordings from 50 sources have been digitized as part of the program—approximately 39 minutes for each day of these seven years....

We invite you to visit the media library and explore Saxony's audiovisual heritage!