The National Archives digitization lab employs about 45 people.
Digitization means taking analog material and making it digitally available to people
online.
Our goal now is to unlock the treasures, and unlock the records that are in the National
Archives and make them accessible to people.
We’re digitizing the collected record volumes for the Confederate States of America.
This particular scanner is a Zeutschel camera from Germany.
Once the book is scanned and then quality controlled by our technicians then those images
will be uploaded online to the archival catalog.
This machine is for filming different documents, like letter documents.
You know, smaller stuff.
Right now I’m filming JFK, John F. Kennedy, the assassination.
In the cases of Civil War records or genealogy records there’s a lot of use of those records.
So in order to preserve that original paper version much longer we digitize this material
and basically allow the paper material to be taken out of circulation.
What you’re seeing here is Eva Braun’s home movies.
And Eva Braun was Adolf Hitler’s mistress.
These were filmed in the late 30s, early 1940s and they were captured by the GIs after World
War II.
We needed a way to preserve that federal record.
So what the Archive purchased a few years ago is called a Spirit 2K 4K scanner.
And basically you are scanning each single frame of the film.
So what you’re seeing there is a split screen.
So on one side is an image that was captured off the scanner and then the other side is
the color correction, scratch, dust, dirt removal.
With the motion picture production process the audio starts out on a separate piece of
film.
If I play the machine we’re going to see the audio showing up on the three different
channels.
The middle one is music and one of them will be effects and one of them will be the narration.
Since the cease-fire in 1953, the North Koreans…
The process that we’re doing here is we get analog sound off of the magnetic track,
we’re capturing it as digital.
But then we’re converting it back out to analog onto polyester film stock.
And that’s a very stable format, that if we put it into cold storage like the kind
that NARA has we could expect to come back in a couple hundred years from now and just
be able to listen to it right off of that.
We’re working on U-Matic tapes which are three-quarter inches wide.
It was a popular format in broadcast all through the 70s and 80s.
A lot of these tapes are 25 to 30 years old, so they may be starting to degrade.
Oxide comes off of the base of the tape and so if you bake it that sort of pulls everything
back together.
You might bake a tape at like 120 degrees like two to three days or maybe even for as
long as five days.
The tapes get cleaned and bar-coded and then they go into the Samma, which is a robot that
migrates all of the videotapes to digital files.
There are roughly 13,000 U-Matic tapes in the Public Research Room upstairs so we are
digitizating those in order to put them online and make them available via the internet.
A lot of times, especially with media recordings like movies or audio recordings you have to
preserve the hardware that actually can play the format.
So we’ve essentially created a museum of vintage hardware to run these audio-video
media when we get them and we need to digitize them.
These are posters, World War II original posters.
We have a Cruze system.
It’s a camera that’s been converted to digitally scan documents.
And after you take the measurements and put ‘em into the system you have to run a test
scan and make sure that your document is centered within the parameters of the measurements
that you’ve taken.
The table itself moves, the camera doesn’t.
The table’s equipped with a vacuum that keeps the documents pretty flat.
This is a Stokes Imaging Camera.
It was custom-built to our specifications.
It’s a state-of-the-art 133 megapixel camera system capable of making a file over a gigabyte
in size.
We’re looking at a glass plate negative that was created in 1914.
It’s depicting some of the construction efforts at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
One of the images kind of caught my eye because of the caption.
It says FDR, Roosevelt, inspecting battleship number 39.
That’s the USS Arizona, which was bombed in Pearl Harbor.
So we’re like, whoa, back up, let’s go take a look at this image in more detail.
I’ve been able to take all the experiences I had working in the analog darkroom and apply
them into the digital realm.
You still have the same experience of wonder and discovery.
For the longest time people had to come into buildings at the National Archives, they actually
had to travel distances to come and look at the paper records.
Our goal now is to take that material and bring it to the desktop or to the laptop or
to phones where people are doing their research.