Digital History
Digital files, while fairly standardized now, have a complex history in the department. This document details that history chronologically, and when relevant, by collection, to provide insight when searching for a file, migrating files, or other related tasks.
Callie Holmes (digital archivist from 2016 -- present) standardized many processes and formats in our digitization workflow. If we say that we have a Holmes transfer of an item, that typically means that a transfer was done after her standardization was applied, typically resulting in a preservation, mezzanine, and access-quality copy of the item (only preservation and mezzanine securely retained) that have followed the same general framework that we continue to use to this day.
In the early stages of in-house digitization, most items were digitized using Samma machines that were designed as a sort of all-in-one solution to capture and encode a file from a tape. If we have a Samma transfer of an item, it's a file created from that process. Unfortunately, most of these files are not intact today, and if you pull one from an LTO, playback and re-encoding is usually not possible. It's unclear whether this was due to issues in the creation itself or file decay over time, but almost all exhibit similar symptoms.
Peabody files have a complex history. The two types of digital Peabody items you'll find on LTO are:
- Digitized files: Any transfers we've done in-house follow the same general patterns and history as other collections. [Footnote for historical purposes: There was a grant project in the 2000s where many tapes were digitized to JPEG2000 files and written to LTO3. Most of these files are not viable.]
- Born Digital Materials: Peabody began to receive born digital materials circa 2010.
Peabody Born Digital Eras
- pre-2012: mostly analog
- 2012: A lot of digital files received on physical formats (hard drives, thumb drives, optical discs)
- 2013: Mostly digital - hard drives were sent to UGA/Peabody then sent to Crawford Media Services to be put online for judging.
- 2014: First all digital year - Files were submitted online via GetAccepted (a vendor for this type of thing), then we received a hard drive from GetAccepted containing all submissions. We were able to get "original quality" files from GetAccepted.
- 2015: First year using OpenWater (a different vendor) - Entrants submitted files online to OpenWater. The Peabody Office obtained the digital files and shared a copy with BMA via hard drive.
- 2016-present : OpenWater - This is the first year that we standardized the process for receiving files from OpenWater, and we've been using the same method (with minor tweaks) since. Entrants submit files to OpenWater. Over the summer, Callie downloads the files from OpenWater (which uses AWS). There is a filesize cap on OpenWater, set by Peabody, meaning that none of these files are very high quality.
The main point here is that since the switch to digital, there is great variability in what we receive. We do not do any processing or file normalization. Most of the OpenWater born digital files are on LTO, stored in a bag under the entry ID.
WSB film in the hands of UGA, like Peabody, predates the creation of the archive, so the history is more knotted. In the 1980s, WSB donated the original 16mm film to the Grady School of Journalism. The journalism school then dubbed the film to U-matic tapes and VHS tapes. The U-matic tapes were sent back to WSB to be their access copies. The VHS tapes were kept at UGA to be our access copies. In 2012, WSB had all of their videotape archived transferred to digital (MXF files on LTO5) by Crawford Media Services. BMA received a copy of those digital files on LTO, as well as all of the original videotapes (including the U-matics that were created in the 1980s). All of the U-matic tapes were digitized to individual files named FMUGAXXXX.mxf, where the four digit (XXXX) number represents the same reel number that WSB reels have to this day. We keep copies of these files close at hand on a local RAID, so that we can quickly provide clean WSB footage to researchers and licensees when they need it but do not require anything better than SD footage.
The WSB Videotape contains all existing videotapes from WSB-TV though about 2012. These videotapes were donated to UGA around that time, after being digitized by Crawford Media Services (the same project referenced above). The WSB Video is considered to be a separate collection from WSB Film for a couple of reasons:
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We do not have licensing rights to WSB Video. We provide master footage for a fee, but anyone wishing to reuse this footage has to obtain permission from WSB and pay the station a licensing fee.
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These files came in separately and were all already digitized. The digital files are MXF files stored on LTO tapes.
Files came to us with the names given by WSB. Some of the files, most notably the "FM" (file master" series have been ingested into ARCHive. Others are on DPHub only, and others are on LTO7 tapes. When we have migrated files from LTO, we add the collection prefix wsb-video (but if you're pulling files from the original LTOs, expect not to find the collection prefix).
The original videotapes of these programs were digitized by Crawford Digital (which no longer exists in name) and written to TAR-formatted LTO tapes. For a decade or so, this was our source for any of these files, so any requests would be filled by loading the TAR LTO on a Linux machine and writing the files over. Many tapes (roughly 2/3) were pulled in this way either for an order or for proactive migration, and the files were written to ARCHive (a few were moved to DPHub). Occasionally, issues would arise when pulling a specific file, and we would return to the videotape, if available, and complete a new transfer. So, a very small percentage have a Holmes video transfer with resulting files written to LTO, Hub, or ARCHive (aka, the usual digitization processs). In 2025, we outsourced migration of all un-migrated tapes to ProTek, and this vendor wrote all migrated files to new LTO7 tapes (WSB331L7-WSB355L7). This means, that as of 2025, all wsb-video files that we originally received from WSB by way of Crawford transfers can now be located on either an LTO7 tape, a mezzanine share on the Digital Hub, or in ARCHive.
1990s -- 2010ish Before the establishment of a digitization unit, most digitization was completed by external vendors, like Crawford Media Services, Cinepost, Colorlab, etc. BMA got a couple of large grants to digitize collections, which is what kick started the in-house digitization program. One grant used Samma machines to digitize Peabody videotapes. Another outsourced digitization of WSB Newsfilm for the Civil Rights Digital Library. Digital files from this time period are not used unless there is no other option. Many Samma files are on LTO3 tapes. Migration of those older tapes is difficult and sometimes lower priority, because many times naming conventions have changed, making files difficult to identify, and often the files are substandard compared to what we produce now, or have decayed, no longer allowing playback or re-encoding.
2011ish -- 2017 For several years, the preservation level file for BMA was a ProRes 422HQ MOV. These files were digitized in house and written to LTO5 tapes. Many of these files are of good quality and should be pulled to fill orders if available. However, there are also a good number of these files on LTO5 that have file naming issues or audio issues. We are slowly migrating these files from LTO5 and moving to ARCHive and/or DPHub.
- In 2014, we purchased our first film scanner, the MWA Nova. Many (a bit over 1,000) film scans were completed on this scanner. Those scans did not produce a 4K "overscan" quality scan, but most did produce a 2K clean-frame scan that closely matches the quality of mezzanine file that we still produce today and send to licensees in many cases. These scans were written to LTO tapes, but are often in bags, and contain folders of DPX images, a WAV audio file (if sound), and a ProRes MOV file.
2017 -- 2019 Files created in this era are of a standardized format and have little naming issues. However, as ARCHive did not yet exist, preservation-quality files were written to LTO tape. The earlier LTO7 tapes represent this constituency.
2019 -- 2022 Files created in this era are of a standardized format and have little naming issues. In 2019, preservation copies began to be deposited into ARCHive, and mezzanine copies (slightly smaller, slightly lower quality, but still often good enough for productions) were written to LTO, to be more readily accessible.
- In 2020, we purchased the Lasergraphics ScanStation, which we still use today. Uniformly, we produce a 4K "overscan" DPX sequence (which is cooked into an FFV1 Matroska with any present audio) and a 2K ProRes 4444 mezzanine file. These scans also have much less stutter, better lighting, and if returning to the Matroska, higher resolution than our Nova scans. For this reason, on occasion we will still need to complete a new scan of an item that has already been scanned if one of these metrics is vital to the recipient.
2022 -- present day Files created in this era are of a standardized format and have little naming issues. In 2022, the Digital Hub came online, and we transitioned from writing mezzanine copies to LTO tape to writing them to the Hub. Preservation copies continue to be written to ARCHive. Mezzanine copies that predate Hub, or any copies that are not sufficient enough quality to be written to ARCHive, continue to be migrated to Hub.