The HistoryMakers Selects Front Porch Digital

Front Porch Digital announced that The HistoryMakers, the nation’s largest African-American video oral history archive, has selected the company’s SAMMA Solo system to migrate some 8,000 hours of irreplaceable archived interviews from videotape to secure and readily accessible digital storage.

"With the election of Barack Obama as the first African-American president, we believe our priceless collection of testimony is more relevant today than ever before, and we are receiving daily requests for access to it," said Julieanna Richardson, executive director of The HistoryMakers. "We selected the SAMMA Solo to help us preserve and eventually facilitate access to the collection because we wanted the efficiency it offers and because it was developed by people who understand archival procedures as well as technology. It is truly a unique product."  

The HistoryMakers exists to raise awareness of the significant contributions African Americans have made to American society and culture. The project’s goal is to produce and make available to a wide audience video interviews with African-Americans who have made a difference, whether they are well-known or unsung. The HistoryMakers shot its interviews on Beta SP videotape, and now wants to transfer its footage to digital storage.  

Like other oral history collections, The HistoryMakers collection recalls the earliest efforts to capture the voice of a people, but at the same time it is distinctive in that it introduces the modern advantages of technology for preservation and increased public and scholarly access. The HistoryMakers was founded in 1999 and its archive is now part of the Illinois State Library system. The oldest person represented in the archive is 106 years old, and the youngest is 29.

Front Porch’s SAMMA Solo is the world’s first semi-automated real-time analog-to-digital file migration system and as such an ideal solution for The HistoryMakers, where a high volume of content must be encoded and logged efficiently and cost-effectively by a small staff. The SAMMA Solo was delivered in December, and plans are for the project to begin in March. The SAMMA Solo automates repetitive processes and incorporates advanced signal analysis to perform much of the evaluation, monitoring, and documenting so any problems with the videotape can be identified and corrected with little or no staff time.

Using the SAMMA Solo, video content can be ingested into multiple file-based formats simultaneously in real time with source timecode preserved even as metadata detailing the condition of the videotape is collected. High-resolution content is automatically moved to nearline spinning disk and then to high-density LTO data tapes within the automated robotic system.

"The HistoryMakers’ goal of maintaining a record of the unique cultural and social contribution of African-Americans aligns perfectly with what is our mission as well," said Mike Knaisch, Front Porch Digital president. "Front Porch’s SAMMA Solo device has the potential to play a critical role both in securing the historic record and in securing access to it."

Front Porch Digital is also engaged in migrating the audio-visual archive at other significant archives, including the U.S. Library of Congress and the National Archives.