Restoration and Conservation
How Do We Perform Restoration and Conservation?
Conservation is aimed at all types of film materials housed at the CCR, including photochemical, electronic, and digital formats. The conservation service addresses the criteria, methods, and techniques necessary to safeguard this rich cultural heritage. Its work focuses on establishing preventive measures for conservation, intervening to stabilize materials, restoring with professional standards, preserving the meaning of each work through material preservation, and ensuring that these materials can be disseminated.
The treatment of **photochemical supports**, whether negative or positive, follows a process of reception, inspection, viewing, preventive and curative treatment, and restoration. Additionally, the CCR has environmentally controlled storage facilities for optimal preservation of the collections, with continuous monitoring of temperature, relative humidity, volatile components, and ventilation.
The treatment of **electronic and digital formats** necessarily involves the maintenance of technologically obsolete but unique equipment that allows access to the content for viewing and treatment.
In all cases, collections are safeguarded under a **digital preservation plan** that establishes the conditions for digitization, ensuring both the preservation and accessibility of the archives. This line of work, specific to film heritage, presents technological challenges, as it involves complex facilities requiring significant investment, methodological challenges, since digital restoration has grown with criteria that still need academic development, and conceptual challenges in setting priorities and ensuring the sustainability of the system.
Currently, we have a **digital laboratory** equipped with 4K digitization systems, digital restoration equipment, and the ability to generate high-resolution dissemination materials.