U.S. National Archives Selects Front Porch Digital

Front Porch Digital announced that the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has selected its SAMMA Robot to digitize thousands of hours of videotape records accumulated by the federal government. The pilot project will rely on a SAMMA 4-stream U-Matic Robot to migrate the records to digital files, thus preserving them and facilitating future access to them.

The National Archives Building in Washington, DC

"This is the initial phase of what we anticipate will be a huge project — bringing the video collection of the National Archives into the 21st century," said Mark Gray, executive V.P. and general manager of Front Porch Digital Americas. "Front Porch’s SAMMA technology is uniquely suited for fulfilling the mission of the National Archive, which is to preserve our heritage for posterity. As it grows and expands over time, this project will become an outstanding example of how our SAMMA solutions can migrate the world’s largest videotape archives."

The NARA audio/video preservation laboratory, located in College Park, Md., stores videotape made by almost every agency of the federal government — from the military, to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to the Department of Agriculture. Made as long as 30 years ago, generations of videotapes have begun to deteriorate. The overall goal of the project is to forestall further losses swiftly and cost effectively and to enable easier access to the content.

Front Porch Digital’s SAMMA robot will provide an easy, automated means of creating preservation-quality digital files from the videotapes. Because it can work day and night unattended, the SAMMA robot is well-suited for a high-volume job like this one.

The SAMMA Robot and an external tape cleaner are set for delivery in December, with the project due to start in the spring. The initial project will digitize only a small portion of the stored content — tapes that were made as reference copies for scholars and other researchers. Front Porch Digital is also engaged in migrating the audio/visual archive at the U.S. Library of Congress and in similar work at the Shoah Foundation.

Front Porch Digital acquired New York-based SAMMA Systems Inc., in the migration and preservation of videotape to digital files, in October.