by Mike Casey, Director of Technical Operations, Audio/Video, Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative, Indiana University The primary job of a digitization facility is, of course, to digitize. This is hands-on work that must be completed onsite. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, our audio digitization engineers were facing weeks, if not months, of working… Read more »
Smithsonian’s Smith Fund Mobile Digitization Truck Field Trip
by Charlie Allen, Quality Control Specialist and Josh Brewer, Quality Control Specialist, Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative, Indiana University In September 2019, Carmel Curtis, Josh Brewer, and Charlie Allen, IU staff members involved in the second phase of the Mass Digitization and Preservation Initiative, took a field trip to the Chicago suburb of Evanston, Illinois… Read more »
Precision Searching with PowerGREP
by Forrest Greenwood, Quality Control Specialist, Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative, Indiana University Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you have a gigantic computer folder that contains over 400 digitized films, each in its own sub-folder. And then let’s say that you want to find out how many of these films are black… Read more »
Knowing Cylinders Backwards and Forwards
by Patrick Feaster, Media Preservation Specialist, Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative, Indiana University Before you read any further, kindly stop and give the following piece of audio a listen. Notice anything strange about it? A little background: it’s one of the oldest known sound recordings made in Togo, captured on a phonograph cylinder by… Read more »
MDPI Work On Display at Mathers Museum
By Darrell Myers, Post Production and Quality Control Manager – Film, Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative, Indiana University IU Professor and Carmony Chair, Dr. Eric Sandweiss, recently partnered with the Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive and the Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative for his exhibit “800 Seasons: Change and Continuity in Bloomington, 1818-2018,” currently… Read more »
AV Digitization by the Numbers: Data from UNC-Chapel Hill’s Expanding the Reach of Southern Audiovisual Sources Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant
by Erica Titkemeyer: Co-Principal Investigator, Project Director Since the late 1980s, staff at Wilson Library Special Collections within UNC Libraries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have worked diligently to migrate and digitize unique audiovisual recordings with the goal of long-term preservation and access. Beginning in 2014 and funded by a series… Read more »
Data from New York Public Library Audio and Moving Image Initiative
by Rebecca Holte Manager, Audio and Moving Image Preservation, Digital Collections Services, New York Public Library Special thanks to Mike Casey for inviting me to participate in this series, and to my NYPL colleagues: Genevieve Havemeyer-King, Media Preservation Coordinator (primary vendor liaison and specification and quality control manager), Ben Turkus, Assistant Manager – Audio and… Read more »
Data From a Massive Media Digitization Project
Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative Dennis Cromwell, Executive Director Adam Nickel, Processing and QC Specialist Patrick Feaster, Media Preservation Specialist Mike Casey, Director of Technical Operations, Audio/Video Brian Wheeler, Senior Systems Engineer, IU Libraries Over the past four years, Indiana University’s Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative has digitized more than 315,000 audio and video recordings…. Read more »
Where Are We?
Where are we? We’ve been on hiatus, taking a summer break. But don’t worry, between lounging poolside, swimming in the ocean, and watching the sunset (not!), we have developed lots of interesting posts for the fall season. They are coming soon to an inbox near you. In the meantime, Mike Casey’s media preservation fairy tale… Read more »
Decoding Dolby
by David Adamson, Audio Preservation Engineer/Quality Control Specialist, Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative, Indiana University Audiocassettes encoded with Dolby noise reduction are notoriously difficult to digitize. Even if metadata makes clear the presence or absence of Dolby or the type used when it is present, it is often impossible to make it sound as intended during… Read more »