The AHDS Centre for the Performing Arts (AHDS-PA) is one of the five arts and humanities data centres that constitute the AHDS. The AHDS, which was founded in 1996, has supported the creation, curation (including preservation), and reuse of digital materials for the UK Arts and Humanities research and teaching community. AHDS Performing Arts based at Glasgow University has been the centre responsible for the drama, dance, theatre, film and television, as well as other disciplines with a focus on participation, performance, and interactivity. During 2007 the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for the UK and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) which had been acting as co-funders of the AHDS took the decision to withdraw their funding. This has left the AHDS without core financial support for its activities as a result its future and that of the collections in its care remains uncertain. This report examines the risks that are faced by the AHDS Performing Arts Collections. We have reached five main conclusions: 1. Performing arts researchers often create rich audiovisual resources that are complex to preserve from both a technical and intellectual point of view. 2. Just over one third of UK Higher Education establishments have an institutional repository, however the majority of these focus curation efforts on textual data in formats such as pdf. 3. Sustained investment is needed to secure an adequate network of repositories so all digital research outputs have a place of deposit regardless of format, data type, scale or domain. 4. Simply preserving data is not sufficient to meet needs. Subject specific expertise is crucial to understanding depositors’ requests and assisting users to interpret collections. 5. Research projects should engage with issues of sustainability from the outset, taking a realistic view of the challenges associated with keeping material accessible in the long-term and planning for them in advance.