Moving Image Preservation of Puget Sound was formed in 2014 to help preserve audiovisual heritage in the Pacific Northwest. MIPoPS assists heritage organizations with the conversion of analog video recordings to digital formats according to archival best practices, working largely with organizations that have neither the resources nor expertise to address these at-risk materials.

The consortium was founded by Rachel Price (former MIPoPS executive director), Anne Frantilla (former City Archivist at Seattle Municipal Archives), Hannah Palin (former Film Archives Specialist at the University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections), and Carol Shenk (former King County Archivist at King County Archives). Audiovisual archivist Anna Briggs was a founding board director, along with Hannah and Rachel. After three years of planning, MIPoPS received its 501(c)(3) status in 2015.

MIPoPS has worked with more than 35 local archives, museums, historical societies, libraries, and heritage institutions, as well as artists and art organizations, to digitize more than 8,000 videotapes. Many of these digitized materials have been made available to the public on our Internet Archive page. MIPoPS also hosts the Moving History quarterly archival screening night series in collaboration with Northwest Film Forum.

Since its founding, MIPoPS has received four federal grants from NEH and NHPRC. Grants such as these have allowed us to work on a larger scale in collaboration with other local heritage organizations and have allowed us to develop and expand on open source tools needed to capture this precious content. MIPoPS continues to maintain and contribute to open-source tools and training materials for use by archivists and the general public. MIPoPS has also expanded into offering events such as free archival workshops on audiovisual preservation and Home Movie Days.