Films and documentaries about archiving

This is a list of films and documentaries about archiving. Not only about professional archiving, but also amateur efforts by anonymous people, collectors of vinyls, VHS tapes or prolific photographers. This page also includes documentaries about preservation and restoration of works by libraries and museums specialist departments, and book digitization projects.

Image	Title	Year	Director(s)	Topic(s)	Language(s)	Duration	Summary
	A free digital library (mirror)	2007	Brewster Kahle	Internet Archive	English 24 langs. (subs)	20 min.	Brewster Kahle is building a truly huge digital library -every book ever published, every movie ever released, all the strata of web history... It's all free to the public- unless someone else gets to it first.
	Adjust your tracking (mirror)	2013	Dan M. Kinem Levi Peretic	VHS tapes	English	84 min.	Adjust Your Tracking: The Untold Story of the VHS Collector. A documentary capturing the modern day VHS culture and VHS collectors. (NSFW-ish)
	Archive (mirror)	2012	Jonathan Minard	Internet Archive	English	12 min.	Archive is a documentary focused on the future of long-term digital storage, the history of the Internet and attempts to preserve its contents on a massive scale. Part one features Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and his colleagues Robert Miller, director of books, and Alexis Rossi, director of web collections. On a mission to create universal access to all knowledge, the Internet Archive's staff have built the world's largest online library, offering 10 petabytes of archived websites, books, movies, music, and television broadcasts. The video includes a tour of the Internet Archive's headquarters in San Francisco, the book scanning center, and the book storage facilities in Richmond, California.
	Digital Amnesia (mirror)	2014	Bregtje van der Haak	Internet Archive	English French (subs) Spanish (subs)	49 min.	Our memory is dissipating. Hard drives only last five years, a webpage is forever changing and there’s no machine left that reads 15-year old floppy disks. Digital data is vulnerable. Yet entire libraries are shredded and lost to budget cuts, because we assume everything can be found online. But is that really true? For the first time in history, we have the technological means to save our entire past, yet it seems to be going up in smoke. Will we suffer from collective amnesia? Featuring Brewster Kahle, Jason Scott, the ArchiveTeam Warrior software, and more.
	Finding Vivian Maier	2013	John Maloof Charlie Siskel	Photography	English	83 min.	A documentary on the late Vivian Maier, a nanny whose previously unknown cache of 100,000 photographs earned her a posthumous reputation as one of the most accomplished street photographers.
	Francisco Boix, un fotógrafo en el infierno (mirror)	2002	Llorenç Soler	Photography	Spanish	56 min.	This documentary is the story of Francisco Boix, a graphic reporter who was a prisoner and a slave in the nazi concentration camp of Matthausen where he shot lots of pictures which eventually where considered as witness in the judgement of Nuremberg, after Second World War.
	Google and the World Brain	2013	Ben Lewis	Libraries	English	83 min.	The most ambitious project ever conceived on the Internet: Google's master plan to scan every book in the world and the people trying to stop them. Google say they are building a library for mankind, but they also have other intentions.
	La oscura era digital: ¡socorro! ¡estamos despareciendo! (mirror)	2004	Jörg Daniel Hissen Peter Moers	Digital preservation Digital Dark Age	Spanish	51 min.	It analyses the effects of digital obsolescence, destruction of data and digital preservation efforts. It includes interviews to Stewart Brand, founder of Long Now Foundation.
	Lost Forever (mirror)	2011	Paul Mariano Kurt Norton	Films	English	30 min.	Reveals the rich and diverse American film heritage and shows us how preservation saves both the cultural heritage and the individual memories.
	Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project	2018	Matt Wolf Kyle Martin	Television	English		Radical Communist, counter-cultural television producer, Apple shareholder, and private archivist Marion Stokes captured three decades of television on her VCR. Her expansive project tore her family apart, but it’s now being digitized by the Internet Archive.
	Rosetta	2012	Scott Oller	Languages	English	14 min.	This documentary takes a look at the Long Now Foundation's Rosetta Project, a unique effort to archive all of the world's languages.
	Saving Our Sounds: Preserving Historical Recordings and Music	2002	Edward Herrmann	Music	English	43 min.
	The Man Who Wanted to Classify the World	2002	Françoise Levie	Libraries	English	60 min.	Paul Otlet was a Belgian who perfected the Dewey Classification system as "the Universal Decimal Classification", in his lifetime alone totalling 17 million index cards of human knowledge.
	The Race to Save 100 Years (mirror)	1997	Scott Benson	Films	English	57 min.	As the documentary points out, 85 percent of all silent pictures are gone forever because of neglect, abuse, and improper storage of original prints. This film stresses the importance of saving these and more recent films as cultural documents that have become part of our shared history. It also takes the viewer through the painstaking process of film restoration, and highlights some of the organizations and individuals who are spear-heading this movement.
	The World's Largest Record Collection (mirror)	2008	Sean Dunne	Music	English	8 min.	Paul Mawhinney was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA. Over the years he has amassed what has become the world's largest record collection. Due to health issues and a struggling record industry Paul is being forced to sell his collection.
	Toute la mémoire du monde (mirror)	1956	Alain Resnais	Libraries	French English (subs)	20 min.	An essay on the potential and the limits of dutifully archived human knowledge, masquerading as a documentary on the organisation of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
	BBC Timeshift - Missing Believed Wiped	2003	Jo Haywood	Television, Video Tape	English	40 min.	The history of the BBC's once prevalent, but short-sighted, policy of wholesale disposal of recorded television content, and the efforts to mitigate that loss.