We can convert many common and unique types of physical and digital source material into a broad range of industry-standard digital formats.
Digitizing
- Your original content, from paper documents and photographs to disk drives and video, will be digitized consistently and accurately.
- We are especially experienced with audio and video tapes, but we can digitize most types of audio-visual materials.
- We can digitize books and collections on paper, from basic business documents to complex graphics and databases.
- We have specialized facilities designed to digitize rare documents, manuscripts, and high-resolution imagery.
- We can provide referrals for services that digitize other unique materials.
- We have special expertise in digitizing high-volume audio-visual materials, using mass-digitization robots and related systems.
- We can set up a cost-effective, automated encoding process to digitize your raw footage and finished productions, from small libraries to high-volume collections.
Standard File and Wrapper Formats
When digitizing videos, the Digital Repository can create many different formats at once. A common combination is:
- MFX wrapped JPEG2000
- MPEG-1
- MPEG-2
- H.264 (MPEG-4)
We can produce many types of wrappers, including:
- Flash
- QuickTime
- AVC
- Windows Media
- Real Media
- Quality-control monitoring is performed consistently on all encoding projects to assure accurate file creation and reproduction.
- Our technical systems are compatible with preservation standards for digital media established by the Library of Congress at the Packard Campus of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center and other digital archive centers.
- Contact us for additional information about converting other types of source files and producing other output formats.
Cataloging and Metadata
- We offer services to index, catalog and add metadata to enable efficient searchability and findability of digital collections.
- We can provide cost-effective cataloging support, based on the size of your collection, level of detail required, and availability of already existing records.
- Our cataloging services support the use of any standard thesaurus or classification system, or we can adapt customized vocabularies for special collections.
Content Management Systems
- We can automatically extract technical metadata from the files and create unique cataloging records for your DAM or CMS, or safely store your files for access later.
- We are able to ingest digital files online, on hard drives, or from digital media such as LTO tapes.
- We can import and export associated XML with all files.
- We are able to associate and add quality assurance data as needed.
- We can perform restoration on many types of digital assets and keep both the original and the restored versions for use.
- We provide access to all archived files through online archive management systems.
Planning Worksheet
Developing an appropriate preservation plan, plus calculating costs for digitizing, preserving and storing files depends on a number of interrelated factors:
- The type of source material
- The size of the collection
- If metadata needs to be added
- If an asset-management or content-management system is needed
- How the files will be stored
- The need to access the files once they are in storage
This downloadable worksheet will help you get started.