The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has selected Front Porch Digital’s SAMMA robot to digitize thousands of hours of videotape records accumulated by the federal government.
The pilot project will rely on a SAMMA four-stream U-Matic robot to migrate the records to digital files. The NARA audio/video preservation laboratory, located in College Park, MD, stores videotape made by almost every agency of the federal government. Some of the material was produced up to 30 years ago, and some of the videotapes have begun to deteriorate. The overall goal of the project is to forestall further losses.
Front Porch Digital’s SAMMA robot will provide an 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 high-volume jobs.
For more information, visit www.fpdigital.com and www.sammasystems.com.