Moving Images: Videotape Recordings

Most of the Oberlin College Archives’ motion picture recordings on VHS cassette tape have some relation to Oberlin College or the City of Oberlin. The rest are, with only a few exceptions, related to Lorain County or the greater Cleveland/Akron area.

For the most part, the videocassettes date from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s. VHS (Video Home System) tape was first released in America in 1977 and began to be replaced by other media in the late 1990s, first by DVCAM tapes on video cameras and then by DVDs in television recording devices.  For this reason, recordings at both ends of the date range often have duplicates in other record groups. Recordings from the mid-to-late 2000s often have DVCAM or DVD duplicates, while recordings from the 1920s through the 1970s often originated in another medium (first film, then, in the 1970s, magnetic tape on reels rather than in cassettes).  This is particularly important for anyone interested in the recordings in the Afrikan Heritage House series or the Oberlin College Shansi Collection series to note, since the majority of both collections originated in another medium (the former on magnetic reel-to-reel tape, the latter on 8mm film).

Even during the time when VHS tape was most popular, professionals often considered it a durable mass-consumption alternative to higher-quality forms of magnetic tape; for this reason, many professional recordings (such as those used in documentaries or news programs) also have Betamax, Betacam, or Digi-Beta (Digital Betacam) originals in the Oberlin College Archives.

Unfortunately, not all of the duplicates or originals are linked with their VHS copies. For those VHS tapes with accession numbers, duplicates can often be found by referencing the original accession record.

The videotape on reels cover a date range of 1971 to 1992, with some undated.  These were held by the Audiovisual Department until 2010 and 2017, and were used as course materials.

In 2017, the Audiovisual Department transferred all of their analog media holdings to the Archives, enlarging the videotape holdings from 29.82 to a total of 156.99 linear feet. This accession includes U-matic as well as VHS tapes and some reel-to-reel tapes. U-matic was one of the first video formats to contain videotape inside a cassette, released to the market in September 1971. The tape is 3/4 inches wide, and is often known as "three-quarter-inch" or "three-quarter." All of the tapes in this accession are arranged in Subgroup III rather than interfiled with tapes from previous accessions.