From the article:
Unbelievable. Unforgivable!
Even if they were just data tapes, all that stuff should've been saved, every bit of data along with teh video and the artifacts. Disgusting. Bureaucrats.
Andy 44, I share your indignation, its a disgrace these items have been lost, it was a unique event.
Archiving material is difficult, if its not an on-going procedure.
I was involved in getting programs off an obsolete tape format, onto a modern one.
Some of the problems were organisational, we started to get tapes out of sequence, or incomplete series. They varied in time and
type. The librarians had started on one shelf, and just went along it, then onto the next.
We queried this with the one's who were paying, and suggested they send us either the oldest one's first. They were more likely to be
in the worst condition, or the ones that had made most money from over-seas sales. That focused their system a bit.
Then the technical problems, the VTR manufacturer(Ampex) had got out of the broadcast industry, and getting video-heads was
difficult and expensive. Also, the older video-tapes were much more abrasive than modern ones, and the head-life was reduced. It
was only through some ex-employees of Ampex, who put us in touch with a company called SpinPhyiscs(I think it was one word)
that the project continued. SpinPhysics agreed to re-furbish the video-heads, and a good job they did too.
We thought it would take about 6 months to complete, it was still going 18 month later when I left it. Had a few more tapes than they
thought...
That was archiving from a tape format(2" Quadruplex) that was obsolete in the late 1970's to a then modern cassette format
(Panasonic D3).
It skipped 1" open reel(C format), and the component analogue formats(Sony Beta/SP and Panasonic MII).
D3 was modern in 1994/5, I doubt if you'd find many of those machines anywhere now.
Please don't bring up video-servers, I still have nightmares...
N.
