MDPI Celebrating 3 years of Operation and Industry Leadership

by Carla Arton, Director of Technical Operations for Film, Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative, Indiana University. This is an archival version of a post originally published on the MDPI blog, which ran from 2017-2020.

Last month the Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative paused to celebrate three years of operation and industry leadership, much of which has been in tandem with Memnon Archiving – a Sony Company. Our mission, to digitally preserve Indiana University’s significant media collections to ensure long-term access for research and teaching, has led to the development of new technologies and workflows that will help museums and educational institutions save rapidly deteriorating recordings of historical events before they are lost forever. We have provided a model for making digital preservation of legacy media faster, higher quality, scaled-up, and easier to access.

After three years, we have a great deal to be thankful for: our institutional support, amazing staff and colleagues (both in and outside of IU), our vendors’ dedication to continued technological advancements, and our students and faculty whose growing use of these collections prove the impact on education that this initiative is making and will continue to make long-term.

Here are the numbers of digitized items as of August 21st, 2018.

• Open Reel Audio Tapes – 67,234 (50,000+ hours)
• Audiocassettes – 50,421 (59,000+ hours)
• VHS Tapes – 38,694 (65,000+ hours)
• LP Records – 38,621 (28,000+ hours)
• 78 RPM Records – 34,449 (3,600+ hours)
• Betacam Tapes – 18,803 (13,400+ hours)
• U-matic Tapes – 14,876 (9,000+ hours)
• CD-R – 11,850 (10,000+ hours)
• Digital Audio Tape – 8,996 (17,600+ hours)
• Film – 6,310 (1,700+ hours)
• Lacquer Discs – 4,112 (1,200+ hours)
• 45 RPM Records – 4,032 (500+ hours)
• Wax Cylinders – 3,997 (100+ hours)
• 1-Inch Open Reel Video – 3,758 (2,300+ hours)
• Betamax Tapes – 1,205 (1,900+ hours)
• 8mm Video – 929 (1,200+ hours)
• Aluminum Discs – 495 (50+ hours)
• Other Analog Sound Discs – 18 (16  hours)

Total Objects Digitized (as of 8/9/2018) – 308,760

Total Duration – 266,614 hours (that’s 11,109 days or over 30 years worth of content!)

Total Storage Space Used – 8.7 Petabytes

Daily Digitization Report courtesy of Brian Wheeler, Senior Systems Engineer, in IU Library Technologies.

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