Fall 2007, Weeks 9 - 11

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
-- Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965) --



"Don't be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid." -- John Keats (1795 - 1821) --

The above are words of advice anyone taking on an experimental digital library project absolutely must keep in mind as they stumble along their merry way. I believe I began my last post with the famous last words " things are turning around," or something to that effect. The very next day, or shortly thereafter, the U-Matic deck malfunctioned yet again.


There once was a man named Bob, who took on an unpaid job.
He made some repairs, to a tape deck that had erred.
But now that he's gone I've got probs.

Bob isn't responding. And you know what? That is okay. The guy isn't paid to do work for the library. So what do we ? Herein lies the problem....

Special Collections will split the cost of a new deck. DLS, based on advice from Bob, thinks spending money on a new deck is silly since all decks will likely have the same problems. What we've been trying to figure out with this collection is - can we do this in-house? That is, can we reformat obsolete analog video media to a digital file with money only for storage with the equipment available in the library usable for no cost? After weeks and weeks of repeating failures we've decided the answer is no.

The deck is malfunctioning in two ways. 1) Its old and the mechanisms aren't engaging and releasing properly, and 2) the tapes are shedding. Sticky shed syndrome is a problem with our tapes. Not only are the magnetic particles flaking off and clogging the tape heads, but they are flaking off and degrading the video signal with every movement. We do not have the means to deal with tape cleaning, potential baking, and tape head cleaning. Time to outsource.

During the last three weeks Preservation got involved in the project and came up with some money. We now have the funds to have 30 tapes reformatted at the university's Center for Media Production. Not my first choice. They will reformat the tapes to DVD and save a digital copy on hard drives that DLS gives them. 10 tapes are being sent over but we have no idea what file format the digitals are going to be, or what quality of DVD media they use.

OH WELL!!!!!! Its come to my attention that the preservations issues are beyond my control. Far, far beyond my control. Maybe, one day, I'll be in a position with the authority and resources to preserve a video collection in my own vision.

So, Basically for the next week I worked selecting clips and compressing clips from the digital video files on the hard drive in the InfoArcade. The clips will go on the ATN web prototype. The clips are reformatted to flash video files (.flv) and are no more than 3 minutes in length for copyright purposes. I also extracted still images from the clips to use as thumbnails for the video clips.

Also during these three weeks I designed the interface, and am now tweaking it a little with the help of the DLS(?) webmaster. I should mention that any tapes with serious problems will be sent to VidiPax for resoration. With funding limited, we will use the web prototype with the clips from the thirty tapes CMP reformats as a visual aid in requesting a grant or other such funding to finish the project.

And the ongoing video preservation bibliography for the report I will submit to DLS about this project.

I talked with my mentor about next semester and it looks like there will be some work to be done on this project. So hopefully I can stay in the department working on a new project and doing work on this video project as it comes around.


Success isn't permanent, and failure isn't fatal. -- Mike Ditka (1939 - ) --