Audio and Video at Scale: Indiana University's Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative

Notes: View the community notes Google doc for this session.

Session Type: Project Update

Slides: View the slides for this update here.

Session Description In 2013, Indiana University (IU) launched a five-year project, known as the Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative (MDPI: http://mdpi.iu.edu/), to digitize and preserve over 300,000 audio and video assets of value from across the university. Among academic institutions, IU has an unusually rich collection of rare and unique time-based media that document subjects of enduring value to the university, State of Indiana, and the world. Pieces range from wax cylinder sound recordings of Native American music to performances by notable graduates of its Jacobs School of Music to media from the collections of IU’s Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.

The project is co-led by IU’s Vice President for Information Technology and Dean of University Libraries. IU is partnering with a commercial vendor, Memnon Archiving Services of Belgium, to set up a facility in Bloomington, Indiana to digitize these materials, in a workflow that will produce as much as 12 terabytes per day of digital data to be preserved beginning in summer 2014.

MDPI was planned out of recognition by IU leadership that large portions of IU’s media holdings were becoming seriously endangered due to media degradation and/or format obsolescence. A 2008-2009 survey of holdings at IU Bloomington (http://www.indiana.edu/~medpres/documents/iub_media_preservation_survey_FINALwww.pdf) uncovered over 569,000 audiovisual items on 51 different physical formats held in collections of 80 different organizational units across the campus, with significant quantities of rare and unique items in danger of becoming inaccessible within 5-15 years due to degradation or obsolescence.

In this presentation, we will outline the goals and history of MDPI, describe the workflows that we are establishing to feed content into the digitization process and manage content coming out of the process, and discuss planned strategies for preservation storage, access, and metadata.

Session Leaders Juliet Hardesty, Indiana University Jon Dunn, Indiana University