Safeguarding the collection: Library staff have digitized thousands of rare recordings

Ron Sutfin—senior technical lead of Media Preservation Unit in Preservation Digital Strategies—is the engineer behind the preservation and digital reformatting of Yale Library’s historic and rare collections of audio, video, and film.

His state-of-the-art studio is housed at 344 Winchester Street within the Preservation and Conservation Services Department. The AV Digitization Studio contains a suite of specialized equipment to support the work of extending the life of the library’s important audiovisual collections.

Digitizing video files

In 2011, the department acquired a GrayMeta SAMMA G6 Media Migration System, considered the gold standard for efficiency and cost-effectiveness in media preservation. SAMMA (System for Automated Migration of Media Assets) enables the transfer of videotapes to preservation-quality digital files.

Initially, the system allowed Yale Library to preserve some of the thousands of oral history videorecordings in the collection of the Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimonies—an ongoing project. Those digitized recordings were on display in the recent exhibition “In the First Person” at Beinecke Library. The Media Preservation Unit also digitized the videorecordings currently on view in the Music Library’s exhibition “Celebrating Willie Ruff as an Oral Historian.”

In May 2024, the department upgraded the hardware and software for SAMMA. Since 2011, Conservation and Preservation Services has transferred more than 7,000 videorecordings to digital format. Before the acquisition of SAMMA, there was no way to accomplish this work internally—it had to be sent out to a media lab that specializes in this work.

Digitizing audio files

The Media Preservation Unit was established in response to a major survey the library conducted in 2014 of its unique audio holdings. The team took on a three-year project to preserve the top-priority items identified in the survey and, in that time period, reformatted 12,000 unique items from Manuscripts and Archives, the Music Library, and other collections.

Within Sutfin’s studio is a RME Digital Audio Workstation. This equipment allows for the digitization of various types of audio recordings: 1/4-inch audio tape, cassettes, digital audio tape (DAT), and other legacy formats. Sutfin built the audio system in August 2023 and has to date digitized more than 1,500 audiotapes.

The process generates two types of files: user files, which are the streamable files that users can access on the website, and master files, which are very large, high-quality versions of the content, holding the maximum amount of information. Within the preservation master files, he embeds metadata, takes photographs to document the original formats, and creates PBCore XML files of metdata (which enables researchers to verify the chain of custody throughout the digitization process).

Preservation and Conservation Services

The expert staff members in the Preservation and Conservation Services Department work to ensure long-term access to Yale Library’s valued collections. The department consists of two divisions: Preservation Digital Strategies and Conservation and Exhibition Strategies.

Preservation Digital Strategies has four teams that work on digital preservation, software preservation and emulation, media preservation, and preservation imaging. The Media Preservation Unit works as stewards of general collection books, rare manuscripts, and audiovisual recordings on reel and on tape. It also cares for the university’s film collections in 8 mm, 16 mm, and 35 mm formats.

Preservation and conservation efforts have three major goals: preventing damage and managing risk, conserving physical artifacts and objects, and reformatting and managing at-risk content and new media formats. These complex processes not only require impressive equipment but also the kind of human expertise found among the division’s expert staff.

Learn more about the Preservation and Conservation Services Department at Yale Library.

—Monica Reed and Deborah Cannarella

Images: In the process of being digitized with the SAMMA system is one of the 120 tapes of interviews with Fidel Castro, ca. 1960s, held in the Cuban Collection at Beinecke Library; Ron Sutfin, loading an audio tape of a Benny Goodman recording on the RME Digital Audio Workstation to digitize it for the Music Library. Photos by Mara Lavitt