Archive Director Dekel Hamatian discusses logistics of the project with Senior Archivist Shloimie Morosow

Since this project was launched, a group of archivists have begun working around the clock to turn the dream into a reality. The project includes scanning tens of thousands of photos from the original 35mm negatives. (The scanning project actualy began a year ago. But now the archive staff have thrown themselves into it 24/6!)

The archive team fully unleashed on the project!

Senior Video Editor Yanky Ascher cleans and fine tunes photos for the gallery, proving that he knows much more than video editing!

After negatives are scanned and added to the internal content management system, Shloimie Morosow and Elkanah Shmotkin work on curating the exhibition, selecting the most unique and striking photos from each batch. After all the photos are reviewed, 40 finalists will be chosen to appear in the exhibition.

Workflow:

Stage1

Logging and organizing all photos into archive-grade acid-free sleeves.

Stage 2

Scanning the original negatives to digital form.

Stage 3

Hi-rez files are backed-up on LTO tapes, and sent to offsite storage. Original negatives are returned to secure offsite storage.

Stage 4 

Basic batch color correction is done.

Stage 5

Photos are migrated to the content management system.

Stage 6

In the CMS, a senior researcher and archivist begins to enter metadata to these photos, including: Date, Location, Event, Basic People and technical info regarding the format and how it was preserved etc.

This part can be really tricky as many photos don't have any desctiption by the original phtographer, so we have to do some detective-work. In most cases, the envelope with the photographer's original notes provide enough clues to start this process.

This difficult and extremely time-consuming step is vital. Once the proper metadata is entered into the historic record, the material becomes searchable in a whole host of ways.

Stage 7 

Photos which are selected for the exhibition are color corrected and touched up. A good photo restorer doesn't change the scene; he merely removes any deficiencies. Fine-tuning Yossi's already beautiful photos brings out the beauty of the moment, making truly worthy of what will surely be a world-class exhibition!

Researcher-Archivist Motti Hazan adds metadata to a batch of photos. On the right-hand screen is a scan of the photographer's original envelope

The films just brought in, waiting to be opened.

This week, we've received and addition to our archive collection, 4 - 100 Foot 16mm B&W films, recorded in the early to mid 1950's by a (then) young student who was trying out some interesting and fancy technology he got a hold of, and after many years of sitting and collecting dust, he has agreed to let us take care and preserve these precious films.

What's fascinating about 16mm is that they can be transferred to HD, think about it, a video taken around sixty years ago, being viewed in HD.

When I saw this, I paused for a second - Wow!As with all our materials, the first thing we do when receiving something new, we inspect its physical condition, then we assign and tag to it a serial number which corresponds to a record in our database in which all its information -technical, as well as the recorded content- is entered.

Recently we got a request from our production team for photos of a particular event, what we have discovered is that have photos of this event in two separate collections taken by seperate photographers. What's particularly interesting with this one is that in each of the photos can be seen the photographer who took the other photo.

Both of these pictures were scanned from 35mm negatives by The Living Archive.

This is another example of our many collections coming together and completing the gaps and angles missing in others. In many cases we have several photo, audio and video collections all of the same event.

In this video we present the great challenge we face with preserving our video collection:

Our video collection is comprised of many small collections mostly recorded by non-professionals. 

There are several aspects to the challenge 

1. All the formats are obsolete, which means finding the right people and equipment for this task is not easy.

2. Since we have many formats we need to spend time on every one researching and finding the right methods and people to preserve them.

3. Even the tapes that were professionally recorded were never done with long-term preservation in mind, so all our tapes are badly deteriorated.

4. Most of our recordings were made by non-professionals who cherished these moments and wanted to capture them but didn't have the resources (including knowledge) to make good quality recordings and therefore besides for having a shaky camera A. they used amateur formats like 8mm and VHS(horrible for long-term). B. they would use different techniques to save money like recording with SLP speeds.

Our Video collection includes:

8mm Film

Super-8 Film

16mm Film

1" Reels

1/2" open reel (EIAJ)

3/4" Umatic

Betacam 

VHS

SVHS

Digital Beta

Mini DV

HDV (on Mini DV)

DVCam

DVCPRO

Digital Files

Years recorded: 1940's - Present

This comparison demonstrates the reward of the hard work searching for the best methods to preserve our videos at optimum quality.

The Goldstein audio collection consists of over a thousand hours of audio, recorded and collected by Aharon Goldstein.  The collection ranges from the early 1950's until the mid ‘70's, all on quarter inch magnetic tape, spooled onto reels. 

A quarter inch tape being played on a Sony deck at the preservation department of The Living Archive

This collection also includes recordings made by Aharon's father Yossi, a man with a passion for recording audio, as well as video, and pioneering the concept of recording the Lubavitcher Rebbe. He managed to obtain recording equipment in the ‘50's, when it was still considered to be a break-through technology and very far-fetched to the average person.  Yossi's passion for recording was passed along to all his sons, who have continued the family legacy.

This collection consists of recordings done in a very unique method, therefore requiring a really skilled specialist with customized and modified equipment to digitize them.

The uniquness of these recordings are in the amount of tracks and the speed at which they were recorded: 4 tracks instead of the common 2, and at speeds of 15/16 and 1-7/8 IPS (inches per second) instead of the standard 3-3/4 or 7-1/2 IPS, this enabled to record over eight times the recording time which a standard recording on the same tape would allow.

Now that these 150 audio reels have been digitized and backed up, another chunk of history has been preserved. 

An LTO-5 tape used for long-term backup at The Living Archive, it has no delicate internal mechanical parts, therefore greatly reducing failing risks as compared to its counterpart the Hard Drive

The digitization of this collection is part of a greater project, the Preservation Project. The mission of this project is to digitize and preserve all media of the Living Archive.

The preservation department at the East New York Ave office.The Living Archive spends countless time, and exhausting effort in researching technology, new and old alike, ensuring that the whole collection of media is digitized and stored at the highest standards possible.

The Living Archive has an in-house quality control system, documenting and critically inspecting each piece of digitizide material that is returned from our various vendors, analyzing it from various technical perspectives, ensuring the integrity of its digitization.

As part of the quality-control process, Motti Hazan is doing an in-depth analysis on newly digitized audio, determining its accuracy.

For more details regarding the content of this collection refer to this post

http://thelivingarchiveblog.squarespace.com/journal/2010/8/24/massive-tape-collection-donated-to-jem.html

This video presents the first batch leaving our facilities for digitization including the preliminary stage to our 3-stage video preservation process, plus a glimpse of our visit to the digitization firm in Cranberry Pennsylvania where we got to see our first batch being digitized.

Video Preservation Stages

Preliminary stage - Entry of tape info into project database.

Stage 1 - Digitization

Stage 2 - Quality Control

Stage 3 - Storage and Backup 

Preliminary stage

Entering the required technical info of the tape into the project’s database and confirming that a corresponding label is tagged to it.

Info entered-

Tape ID

Tape format

Tape length

Recorded speed

Externaly visible tape condition

With this screen we enter basic media info into the project's database

Once that’s done we safely package all the tapes into totes and notify the digitizing firm which tapes (ID’s and formats) are included in the shipment and they should expect, once they receive the shipment they confirm that the shipment indeed matches the description we’ve sent them and all the tapes were received, now they can go on to starting the digitization process.

In future posts we will present the 3 stages in detail

Two white cardboard boxes each almost the size of a tissue box filled with Medium-format negatives, WOW! was the response of everyone around Medium-Format? We haven’t seen much of those around here.

 Opening the box of Medium-Format negatives on it's arrivalThe photo's quality and condition being inspected by an archivist

The negatives relocated to archival-grade polypropylene sleeves

We all knew what this meant, if it’s close to four times the size of a 35-MM film photo then it must have 4 times the amount of detail.

 The Benefit of having these professionally-taken photos does not only express itself in megapixels but also in the quality of the shot.

when we release a video, from our various collections we will choose the recording with the best image quality and the recording with the best audio quality and combine them together to creat the best possible quality video of that event. In this case the video we chose was of 1/2 inch open reel recorded by a Professional crew hired by Rabbi Krinsky in honor of the event and the audio of 1/4 inch audio tape reel recorded by Rabbi Aharon Goldstein, after many hours spent on the preservations side restoring both sources and many hours spent by the editors syncing them together the results are magnificant.