We are keeping busy here, digitizing photographs and making them accessible via the Library’s Digital Commons. Another large part of the Spreading the Word project is digitizing the audio and video materials that are part of the C. Eric Lincoln Lecture Series, C. Eric Lincoln, Bishop J. Howard Dell, Issac R. Clark Memorial, Martin Luther King Fellows in Black Religious Studies, Inc., and the Society for the Study of Black Religion Collections.

Magnetic tape – of which audio and video tape is comprised – is not considered a good long-term storage medium for archival material. The main concern with magnetic tape is instability of the binder (which holds the content), and the rapid obsolescence of the equipment. Video has had over 56 formats since its creation in the 1950s; that means you would need a different machine for each of these formats to play! Many of these formats have been superseded and working equipment is rare or no longer available. To top it off, these machines must be well-maintained so as to not damage the tape as it is playing and to produce the best quality transfer possible. This is why we chose to outsource the digitization of these special formats to a local company, Crawford Media Services.

Crawford Media Services provides “end-to-end creative and post production services, including solutions for mass migration of legacy content to digital formats, storage and archiving, media asset management, and e-commerce enabled on-line publishing”. They have acquired and maintained a large collection of legacy professional playback decks and systems which were necessary for the varied formats in the project’s collections. We delivered over 1,300 audio and video tapes of various formats to Crawford in January, and just recently picked them back up with the tapes cleaned, repaired (when  necessary), and digitized, along with three RAID array hard drives which contain the digital content that will be backed up on a server and made available via digital commons. We are excited to begin reviewing these materials and to share them with you! Here are a few images of the equipment at Crawford used to digitize magnetic media:

Occasionally video tapes get dirty from poor storage environments. Machines such as these are used to clean the tape surface to ensure best playback possible.

Otari MTR-12 and MX-55 machines used to digitize 1/4 inch audiotape containing lectures and sermons from the Issac R. Clark Memorial collection.

The Crawford cat. Mascot and Chief Security Officer  🙂