Digitizing filmstrips

Some of the collections I've worked with recently at the archive have included filmstrips, those classic teaching aids that combined still images with a tape recording and jarring beeps to supplement our lessons. Because I have been working with digitizing strategies for film and video--as well as still images--I am of course thinking about how best to digitize filmstrips. Most of the content available online is either for professional transfer services--which probably are best but would be costly--or for DIY projects that assume a lack of access to, say, a scanner. These are probably aimed at persons who want to transfer their slides without investing in any special equipment. My interest is how an archive could digitize filmstrips on a budget. (Because pretty much everything archives do is "on a budget.")

I assume that I have three basic steps to undertake:

1. Scan each frame of the filmstrip as an individual file.
2. Transfer the tape recording to an audio file.
3. Create a movie file that synchronizes the images to the audio track.

For each of these, I would want to employ the same digital preservation standard that is recommended for general files of that type. The images might be 400-dpi TIFFs, for example.

The newly made video files could then be burned to DVDs for access, with the original files stored on a server, or they could be hosted online, depending on the archive's website. But filmstrips are a useful artifact to digitize and disseminate. They have a nostalgia factor for anyone my age or older because they were so common to our student days. They are also interesting as a pedagogical tool; the way the information was presented is always interesting, even as the content might grow outdated. And think of the fun trying to explain to History Day students what those beeps signify.