The Migrating Media project was developed as a model for new ways to prepare older media for a digital future ensuring a vital contemporary presence for the moving image art of the late 20th century. Migrating Media offers non-profit arts and cultural organizations in Upstate New York a forward-looking and efficient means to safeguard significant video collections of tapes that would otherwise be lost to format changes and tape decay. Each year Migrating Media will digitize about 1000 titles, which represent independently produced videos with significant ties to our region. Collections range from works that were produced by video artists, activists and social-issue documentary makers, for exhibitions and cable access broadcasts throughout New York State, to those tapes that document presentations by artists in the fields of music, performance, literature and visual arts. Migrating Media creates a new space in the digital world of the 21st Century for the analog video collections of the recent past, that until now have remained inaccessible on obsolete formats such as 3.4 or Umatic tapes. In this way, the moving image media arts and cultural heritage of our region can be viewed and shared with a broad public for generations to come.
Migrating Media was born in the Fall 2007 at the annual conference of the Association of Moving Image Archivists (held at Eastman Kodak in Rochester), immediately following a special presentation entitled History of Video Art: New York Pioneers. The panel, which was organized by Independent Media Arts Preservation (IMAP) and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), featured presentations by Upstate arts organizations including the Everson Museum (Syracuse), Experimental Television Center (Owego), and Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center (Buffalo). Based upon the preservation needs demonstrated that day, as well as the major role our region played in the advancement of media art, Media Matters founder and CEO Jim Lindner resolved to assist our region by donating a SAMMA Solo. The unprecedented donation was meant to spearhead the preservation efforts of arts organizations across New York State, and to save the cultural treasures of our regions videotape collections. Mr. Lindner is recognized in the field of media arts for his commitment to preserving independently produced work, such as videos made by artists and activists, and in 1995 won Anthology Film Archives prestigious preservation award for his work in the field. He is an internationally respected authority on the preservation and migration of magnetic media and has pioneered many of the techniques now commonly used for videotape restoration. In 1992 he founded VidiPax, one of the first multimedia preservation companies, and later advanced the technologies of migration further by founding SAMMA Systems, responsible for the development of automated migration systems such as SAMMA Solo which simultaneously transfers analog video to multiple digital formats for preservation and access.
The SAMMA Systems, including the SAMMA Robot and SAMMA Solo, have been implemented globally, at commercial broadcast companies such as ABC, academic institutions and libraries, and some of the nations most recognized archives like the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Archives, the Holocaust Museum , etc. Until now, the SAMMA technology, which is responsible for saving over 20,000 hours of the worlds videotape content, has been out of reach for non-profit arts and cultural organizations with smaller collections and limited funding. Mr. Lindners visionary gift will allow organizations with significant videotape collections access to this cutting edge technology. Videotapes on obsolescent formats will be given a new digital life in both archival form for preservation, as well as multiple exhibition formats for access.
Following training on the SAMMA Solo in late March, Migrating Media will being its first pilot year transferring analog tape collections, starting with tapes from Western New York. An important component of the process is the assurance that the newly digital materials will be archived professionally. Each participating organization will either have sufficient resources to maintain the uncompressed digital files or partner with a digital library that has the capacity to provide storage, management and public access. This insures professional stewardship of the files, helps advance scholarship and research and provides for the interests of the public sector. We have existing agreements for storage with the Poetry Collection of the University at Buffalo and with the Rose Goldsen Archive at Cornell University. In this way, the project builds on the new potential for partnerships between non-profit arts organizations and university-based digital libraries to serve as stewards of New Yorks video legacy. The projects Advisory Committee includes representatives from the George Eastman House (Rochester, NY), the University of Buffalo, Cornell University, as well as the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, New York University (Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program), and Standby (NYC), among others.
