Isaac Fink digitizes vinyl albums at IU's media digitization and preservation initiative. Staff photo by David Snodgress
Bake at 120 degrees Fahrenheit for 12 hours. That’s the recipe to fix old polyester-based tapes in a special oven at the Indiana University Innovation Center. Baking the tapes helps repair years’ worth of damage so their contents may be digitized into a massive collection as part of IU’s Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative, or MDPI.
“It is our connection to history,” said IU chief information officer Brad Wheeler, who is a co-chair of the project. “Otherwise, many of these things will just be gone.”
IU announced the project years ago and began physically digitizing audio, video and film this summer. Officials aim to digitize more than 280,000 recordings by IU’s bicentennial in 2020. It’s funded by the Office of the President, Office of the Provost, Office of the Vice President for Research and other gifts.
Workers in the Innovation Center digitize up to nine terabytes of data per day. They work in shifts from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m.
Director of technical operations Mike Casey said the project is vital in preserving the media because of two main factors: degradation and obsolescence. He estimated the school has only about 10-15 years to digitize a lot of the media, especially things such lacquer discs, which are audio storage media similar to vinyl records.
“It’s leaving a narrow window of opportunity,” said Casey. “With lacquer discs, it’s literally a race against time.”
And even when recordings are in OK shape, the devices used to play them have largely become obsolete, if not extinct. Andrew Dapuzzo is the Bloomington operations manager for Memnon Archiving Services. IU partnered with Memnon to do a large portion of the digitizing. He recounted driving to Ohio to get 12 VCRs for the project.
“They were the best of the best…in the '80s,” he said.
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