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Comment by jl6 | Hacker News Reader

I’ve inherited a bunch of VHS tapes from around 2003-2008, mostly recordings of live broadcast football matches, including the commercial breaks. Who would I contact to work out if there’s any archival value to them? Part of me thinks they’re just not old enough and surely the stations had their own archives by that point, but part of me thinks they probably didn’t keep material in context with the ad breaks and possibly someone might find that interesting.

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Take a peak on Reddit's /r/datahoarders or /r/datacurator. There's also https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ who may point you in a direction.

Sometimes stations do keep a record of their old broadcasts. But that depends on their size, organizational structure, funding, etc. some stuff is just lost to time simply because someone felt it was cheaper to just reuse tapes.

As for value, that's hard to determine. Depends on what was taped, when, by whom and in what kind of context. That's where curation comes in to play.

> archival value

If you want copies of old TV shows that had bad DVD/BD copies, and can get through the VCR snow, then maybe... uploading that stuff anywhere would probably still incur the wrath of DMCA takedowns though, so personal use only.

Back in the early 00s, I had a DVR and for the life of me, I couldn't get a clean copy of some shows. Stations would always throw junk on the screen, and some repeats of repeats would also have them (and sometimes weird cropping angles to boot)

Maybe you know this, but incredibly and amusingly (to me at least) it's sometimes the answer to post a comment here like yours, and someone appears saying [X] archival group will be happy to take them, email blah to arrange shipping.

Of course, absence of that doesn't mean there's no value to anyone.

info at archive dot org

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