Filmstrips were a 20th century media format with a sequence of still images on 35mm film with an optional soundtrack. They have been almost completely ignored by archivists.
Because they were printed on long strips of 35mm film, there is no reasonably-priced equipment that will take an entire filmstrip and preserve it in a high-quality digital form. Machines do exist, but they are built for Hollywood and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Most filmstrips from the 1950s-1980s were printed on Eastmancolor film stock, which is notorious for uneven dye fading, leaving most a strong shade of red. Worse, the binder chemical that holds the dye layers in place tends to break down over time, and many Eastmancolor filmstrips will simply be unrecoverable in a few more years.
Most other film stocks did not behave like this, and filmstrips printed on film stocks like Eastman LPP can still be found in excellent shape, but the vast majority were printed on Eastmancolor, and will soon be lost forever.
Because filmstrips are printed on 35mm film, there are only bad options in the consumer space for preserving them. In order to save them, I have two choices: Buy a refigerator-sized machine made for Hollywood costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, or cutting the filmstrips into pieces that will fit in a flatbed scanner designed to scan photo negatives. Because I don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars, I am forced to do the latter.
It doesn't bother me to do this, as there's literally no other way they would ever be saved if I didn't. The entire film preservation community has had decades to save filmstrips and they didn't, leaving those of us who care about preserving the format to do what we need to do to save the format.
If a filmstrip still has its soundtrack, it can be assembled into a video that simulates how someone would have viewed it at the time. Only having access to a flatbed scanner means scans need to be cropped and straightened by hand. The filmstrip soundtrack on record or cassette needs to be digitized on good equipment. If a filmstrip was printed on Eastmancolor, the filmstrip needs to be color-corrected, though some Eastmancolor is so faded it's not possible to get the true colors back. Then the soundtrack and frame scans are assembled in a video editor, human-like transitions are added, and it can be uploaded to the Internet Archive and YouTube.
Everything I preserve is uploaded to the Internet Archive with select restorations also uploaded to YouTube. On the Internet Archive, I also upload the original scans and audio captures I make in lossless or uncompressed formats. Since many of the filmstrips I am preserving are at the end of their life and chemically breaking down, there may not be a chance to ever scan them again, so making a high-quality scan of these filmstrips as soon as possible and making it available.
I can put in the time and the effort to scan and save all these filmstrips, and restore the ones with soundtracks, but it's going to take many more years. During this time, I'll also be fighting to raise awareness about the plight of filmstrip media. You can help by:
Thank you for helping me save these forgotten parts of history!