A project to address orphaned audiovisual media concerning Labrador.

Labrador records belong in Labrador-based institutions, and Indigenous records belong in their home communities. However, some records may be more burdensome than beneficial. We began the Broken Records project to provide interim stewardship for audiovisual media in rare or obsolete legacy formats, when heritage institutions and communities cannot take them or do not want them. They may may lack the equipment to read the records, or the capacity, expertise, or even mandate to conserve them, particularly when their contents cannot be readily ascertained.

Our Goals

Brack and Brine will receive, document, consolidate, and conserve orphaned audiovisual media in hopes of achieving a critical mass of materials for further action, such as seeking solutions and partnerships for cost-effective digitization and transferral to archival repositories in Labrador, or other means of developing the records to provide community access to the content.

We Provide

• basic stewardship of the media
• storage in Labrador under reasonable conservation standards;
• long-term planning to ensure that records are not discarded, neglected, or forgotten;
• basic description and documentation of all records, including of their provenance;
• where possible, information-gathering to determine records’ histories and infer their content;
• liaising with local institutions to work towards finding appropriate homes for the material.

We Accept

• media in difficult-to-read legacy formats
• that contain or are thought to contain records of Labrador subjects, and
• that no appropriate, local institutional repository currently has the capacity or interest to accept.

Ownership

We cannot accept materials on a temporary, conditional, or interim basis.  On accepting media, we acquire full ownership of them as physical records (not copyright). This is necessary in order to ensure that we can freely process the records later on, including transferring them to local repositories when possible.

We will never sell records, their content, or the rights thereto.  Regardless of the project outcome, we will not discard any records containing meaningful content of relevance to Labrador communities, nor take any actions that will diminish the prospects for long-term community access.  If for any reason we cannot keep them, we will find other suitable institutional homes for them, offering them once more to all local repositories, and thereafter to other responsible heritage institutions.

Limitations

• We provide our best conservation efforts, consistent with industry standards and expert recommendations, within the limits of our resources, but we do not have highly specialized facilities, and legacy media formats are often inherently fragile. Records’ condition and readability may decline over time, even in ideal conditions, and we cannot guarantee the survival of their content, especially considering that we may accept records whose condition and readability at the time of acceptance cannot be ascertained.
• We cannot guarantee that all records will contain sufficiently relevant and notable content to ultimately be of interest to communities, researchers, or repositories. Records discovered to have minimal value or relevance to Labrador may not be retained.
• We cannot guarantee the ultimate success of the Broken Records project. Media accepted by Brack and Brine may never be digitized or made meaningfully accessible to communities; however, we will certainly do our best.
• We will assume all costs associated with the upkeep of records in our possession, but we cannot pay to acquire the records themselves, nor to ship them to our facility.