But the irreplaceable images and sounds of the nation's most extensive indigenous media collection have faced a behind-the-scenes race against a future deadline.

Boosted by a new $5 million funding promise for the coming year, archivists at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies use a mix of the latest and outdated technology to digitise photos, film and audio.

The Institute's community and public relations director John Paul Hanke said some audio tapes - which may have spent decades in weather exposed sheds before being donated - had to be baked for several days at high temperatures to ensure they could be listened to and converted.

"Some audio files have one shot only at being recorded," he said.

The deterioration of original recordings were not the only challenges. The institute needs to piece together and sometimes rebuild long-forgotten machines to play the analog file before it can be copied into the modern form.

"The challenge for us is a lot of these companies never make these machines or parts any more - we've got to go to eBay, collectors, old recording stations, and our technicians also design and create parts themselves," Mr Hanke said.

The collection's oldest film - a copy of the original - is anthropologist A.C. Haddon's 1896 recordings from the Torres Strait, but films even from the early 1990s need to be digitised.

It's no small job.

The institute has 3,000 videos in various obsolete forms, about 75 per cent of its video collection, which needs to be digitised before 2025 or its content will be lost. Another 1365 audiotape reels directly related to film material need similar conversion, as does about 15,200 hours of general audio recordings (about 40 per cent of the audio collection). The institute is about 20 per cent through digitising its 650,000 images.

Films and audio recordings kept in refrigerated store rooms have their digitised files loaded onto a server.

Institute chairman Professor Mick Dodson welcomed the $5 million federal funding announced on April 30 for the preservation and digitisation of the collection, a 50 per cent boost from 2014-15.

He complimented Education Minister Christopher Pyne for being the "only minister that's really gone into bat for us" in 20 years, but said $45 million was needed across about five years to ensure the threatened parts of the collection survived.

"The $5 million gives us breathing space to work on the long-term as to how we fix our precarious financial situation," he said.

"The problem isn't just with the collections, there's an overall budgetary problem that we've been warning successive governments over for a 20-year period."

In January, before any guarantee of future digitisation funding, the institute re-allocated 18 positions to the collections unit from the research and corporate services areas to assist with the urgent work.

On May 14 the Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove will launch the AIATSIS Foundation, designed to encourage private investment in the institute's work of digitising, sharing and growing its collection.

Professor Dodson said the value of the public collection - from the only known recorded singing in a Tasmanian Aboriginal language, to information on all 250 languages spoken at the time of colonisation - was indisputable.

"Our collection has been used to help revive language around the country, or to save language as it was threatened," he said.