Washington

One of the more wonderful aspects of working in this field is the experienced people working in it, who are prepared to open their doors and share with us the immense knowledge they have built up over the years. It was therefore a wonderful opportunity to be able to travel to Washington and pay a visit to the archives of the Holocaust and Smithsonian museums.

Our first visit was to the United States Holocaust Museum where they presented to us their archive that comprises of thousands of hours of rare moments that document this painful chapter. We immediately realized the value of this trip which helped me personally understand that all the concerns that I had were extremely relevant, and we were fortunately able to bring to the fore these concerns before beginning the project.

The central issue that they brought to our attention was the importance of managing an intelligently organized database. They themselves, much to their dismay, were not fortunate to realize this at the onset of their project, so that as they find themselves today at later stages, this all becomes progressively more apparent. Actually, on the very day before we traveled, Elkanah and I came to the conclusion that one of the foremost concerns for our project should be the upgrading and organization of our database, and our dialogue with them only strengthened our belief that we were on the right track.

At a certain point during our conversation with them an interesting thought occurred to me. We had in one room to one side Elkanah, the director of our archive that contains thousands of hours rare moments that played an important role in the setting up of the Chabad organization. Opposite him sat the director of the huge archive of video and sound recordings that are part of the rare documentation of the holocaust. Both were explaining to each other the importance and sensitivity of the material that was in their possession. In fact both were holding in their possession material of such immense importance, and that any wrong move of theirs might disrupt the flow of historical information to future generations, that could even lead to the disappearance of these events from history books. Already today we have such an example with many people denying that a holocaust ever took place.

The Smithsonian Institution ArchivesOur next destination was the Smithsonian Institution where we met Ms. Sarah Stauderman who was responsible for a huge department that coordinates the archival material of the whole museum. It was amazing to see how much knowledge and experience this woman had, and how she so kindly gave up of her precious time to show and explain it all to us. We began our tour in their storage area where we were able to view a small section of their archive, since a huge portion was stored deep in the Iron Mountains. Naturally, it was all stored in an extremely organized fashion and in controlled climatic conditions. From there we passed through their conservation and conversion departments, some specializing in picture archives, others in sound, till we reached the area that we had been waiting to see, where they transferred all their video material from analog to digital format.

In addition to their impressive array of devices, in this department there was also a SAMMA Solo (we will discuss this later) which held a significant part of our whole interest.

Preservation Assistant; Ms. Sarah Stauderman - Director Smithsonian Institution Archives; Rabbi Elkanah Shmotkin, Director, JEM; Dekel Hamatian, The Living Archive Preservation Manager

Sarah explained to us how the sampling process went and how the Sama solo integrated within it. Honestly, at first I was not that excited with what I saw, I had been looking forward to something far more automated; however, much to our surprise we began to realize that this was all far more complex.

She also explained that the format which they chose to transfer to was Motion JPEG 2000 (we shall discuss this too later), an area I realized would require much research.

We completed a long day with many question marks, but in fact you could still call this the grand beginning of our project.