The preservation of video is an ongoing project of the Video Data Bank. Our total holdings, including works both in and out of distribution, include over 4,000 titles of original, and in some cases rarely seen, video art and documentaries from the late 1960's on. Seen as a whole, these videos are an invaluable record of the progress of art and artistic uses of technology through the past three decades, as well as a record of how artists' have responded to the social issues of their time. We have successfully preserved over 40 titles from the 1970's by cleaning and transferring tapes from older and fragile formats to newer and more stable formats. Many of these titles are from the Castelli-Sonnabend collection, the first major collection of artists' video, and all preserved titles have been made available for distribution.

The Video Data Bank Preservation Program has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts.