Digital History

Introduction

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.

Terminology

Holmes

Callie Holmes (digital archivist from 20xx -- 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.

Collection-Specific

wsb-video

Files for wsb-video collections (including most subseries like ac, rndm, olympics, and so on) are some of our oldest digital files. 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 the Digital Hub or ARCHive. 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. 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.