Digitizing the Past
June 17th 2007 08:50
One of the recent ads on NZ television announces that now all our favourite programs will be available via our computers – it claims almost at the touch of a button. The reality is slightly different: only the ‘favourite’ programs that the company has made available can be viewed. At this point my favourite program may not be what TVNZ considers their favourite program. Be that as it may, it’s great that programs from the past that were in general lost to the viewing public are now becoming viewable again. For instance, my wife is keen to catch up on a children’s series we saw years ago called The Champion, which was about a black American soldier in NZ during the war, but it’s not available yet.
As I mentioned briefly in yesterday’s post, the same process is moving forward in the States. The Museum of Broadcasting Communications, which has a huge collection of audio and video material on tape, has begun to digitize its material, which means that not only is the material preserved in a better format, but it’s much more readily available to the public.
As they say, in the past ‘a visitor interested in watching a particular television broadcast would have to search the museum’s database to find their selection, write down the tape’s identification number on a request form and submit it to a front-desk employee. After assigning the visitor a viewing booth, the staff member would locate the tape and insert it into a VCR bank that fed signals to the viewing booths. If a visitor wanted to listen to an audio tape, an employee would find the item, hand the visitor the tape and an audio cassette player, and direct the individual to a viewing booth.’
Now, through partnership with IBM, an online visitor to the Museum can do far more than a physical visitor in the past. At this stage, there is a great deal more material to be digitized, but the process is moving forward at the rate of about 1500-2000 hours a year, per ingest station. (I’m not entirely sure what an ‘ingest’ station is, though I presume it’s some kind of individual setup that gets things digitized).
Soon the Museum will re-open its physical doors, and along with the hundreds of thousands of online visitors, will make much better use of its material than it’s ever been able to do in the past.
As I mentioned briefly in yesterday’s post, the same process is moving forward in the States. The Museum of Broadcasting Communications, which has a huge collection of audio and video material on tape, has begun to digitize its material, which means that not only is the material preserved in a better format, but it’s much more readily available to the public.
As they say, in the past ‘a visitor interested in watching a particular television broadcast would have to search the museum’s database to find their selection, write down the tape’s identification number on a request form and submit it to a front-desk employee. After assigning the visitor a viewing booth, the staff member would locate the tape and insert it into a VCR bank that fed signals to the viewing booths. If a visitor wanted to listen to an audio tape, an employee would find the item, hand the visitor the tape and an audio cassette player, and direct the individual to a viewing booth.’
Now, through partnership with IBM, an online visitor to the Museum can do far more than a physical visitor in the past. At this stage, there is a great deal more material to be digitized, but the process is moving forward at the rate of about 1500-2000 hours a year, per ingest station. (I’m not entirely sure what an ‘ingest’ station is, though I presume it’s some kind of individual setup that gets things digitized).
Soon the Museum will re-open its physical doors, and along with the hundreds of thousands of online visitors, will make much better use of its material than it’s ever been able to do in the past.
| 28 |
| Vote |
Add To: 
Subscribe to this blog
