Abstract
Widely used in schools, offices, communities, and homes since the 1970s, a huge amount of audiovisual documents have been recorded on magnetic audio and video tape. In 2019, UNESCO's Information for All Programme（IFAP）and the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives（IASA）jointly launched the Magnetic Tape Alert Project to warn that if these audio and video recordings are not digitized and transferred to safe digital repositories by around 2025, they will likely never be accessible again. This article outlines the issues raised by the project.
