The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum selects SAMMA system

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has selected the System for the Automated Migration of Media Assets, (SAMMA), to migrate over 4,600 hours of videotaped survivor testimonies from the analogue to the digital domain.
The recordings are a collection of interviews produced by the Museum to preserve first-hand accounts from the dwindling population of Holocaust survivors. The project will use SAMMA to produce multiple high and low resolution digital files of the recordings simultaneously.
The system will be configured in SAMMA Systems’ New York headquarters according to the Museum’s specifications and subsequently installed on site for the duration of the project, anticipated to span between five and six months.
The automated process will allow for unmonitored migration while SAMMA’s expert system supervises and documents the quality control of each media item. Archive staff will barcode and load the tapes, enabling SAMMA to process the material 24/7.
SAMMA combines robotic tape handling systems with proprietary tape cleaning and signal analysis technologies. SAMMA uses specially designed components to gather technical metadata throughout the entire migration process, ensuring that the process is documented in-depth while gathering important metrics about the health of an entire collection. The final product for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum will be one high resolution and two low resolution digital files of each master tape, and the technical metadata describing the condition of the media item and the migration process.
The interviews are of survivors living in all reaches of the globe, including the United States, France, Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Lithuania, Poland, the former Yugoslavia, Macedonia, Latvia, the Netherlands, Israel, Belarus, and Ukraine.
“When completed, these interviews will reside on the Museum’s computer network and will be accessible to visitors who wish to view them” explained Arnold Kramer, Chief Information Officer at the Museum. “The goals of this project include increasing ease of access to the interviews and creating preservation digital files that will maintain their usefulness into the future.”
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