Analog Archive Blog
Metadata and File Naming for Tape Archives That Age Well
A practical system for naming and organizing transferred cassette and VHS files so they stay usable over time.
Create stable identifiers early
Every physical tape should map to a stable project identifier before capture starts. This prevents confusion when labels are incomplete, duplicated, or handwritten inconsistently.
A predictable naming pattern such as collection-date-tapeid-side helps teams and families locate source files quickly years later.
Metadata should stay simple and durable
Capture the essentials first: date estimate, location, event type, participants, and any known rights notes. You can always enrich metadata later, but missing basics are hard to reconstruct.
Good organization is not just operational convenience. It is one of the strongest long-term preservation multipliers in any digitization project.