Case Study

Migrating a great world collection

Library of Congress

The Library of Congress is believed to include 29 million books, 2.7 million recordings, 12 million photographs, 4.8 million maps and 58 million manuscripts. Being one of the world’s largest collections, its digitisation and preservation is a major task.

The SAMMA* robotic system for migrating videotape to digital files was selected to preserve the massive collection of videotapes in the archives of the Library of Congress (LOC). The system was developed by SAMMA jointly with the LOC and other international organizations specifically for migrating the half million video and television records housed at the library.

SAMMA migration systems are now in operation at the LOC’s new National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, VA, a state-of-the-art facility made possible by a gift of $155 million from David Woodley Packard (son of the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard Co.) and the Packard Humanities Institute. The facility was dedicated in July 2007.

The Packard Campus comprises three main areas: a collections building, where some 5.7 million items (1.2 million moving images, nearly 3 million sound recordings and 1.5 million related items such as manuscripts, posters and screenplays) will be housed under ideal conditions; a conservation building, where the collections will be acquired, managed and preserved (and where SAMMA systems are installed); and a separate facility with 124 vaults where nitrate films, which require special conditions, will be stored safely.

The SAMMA robotic systems run automatically to create preservation-quality digital files from cassette-based media, can work 24 hours a day and thus vastly improve preservation throughput and efficiencies. The task of the SAMMA system to digitise the LOC collection will be ongoing for many years due to the size of the collection.

It is estimated that the Packard Campus produced approximately two petabytes (2,000 terabytes) of digital content in its first year of operation, increasing to an annual rate of three to five petabytes as additional, planned systems are brought online. Two petabytes of data on CD-ROMs, each holding 700mb, would create a stack of discs more than two miles high.

* DAMsmart is the exclusive agent for SAMMA archival solutions in Australia and New Zealand.