 So everyone, this is Kristen Lays from Heritage Preservation. We've had a chance for some of us to say hello in the chat box. But again, I want to remind you where it is. It's just to the left of your screen. And we can use that to communicate during the webinar today. I'm going to put a note in the chat box right now. Just to alert you where it is. We've had a chance for us to also say how hot it is, and we're looking at some pretty high temperatures across the country. Here in DC, it is hovering around 100 degrees today with the heat index. So I'm going to move that away, that pole away right now. I just want to welcome you to the Collecting to Connections online community. Heritage Preservation is moderating this in cooperation with the American Association for State and Local History. And we have funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. And the site is designed and produced by Learning Time. So you've come here through the site, and hopefully you've found things easy to find. But we have just posted a tour of the whole site on the homepage. So you can check on that if you haven't had a chance to look around the site already. The goal of the online community is to help smaller museums, libraries, archives, and historical societies quickly locate reliable preservation resources and network with their colleagues. And this is an outreach that continues the work that's already been done with the Connecting to Collections initiative, including the Connecting to Collections Bookshelf and the workshops and webinars that Heritage Preservation and IMLS have already produced. About twice a month on the site, we will be having a feature resource. And right now our current resource is the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts, or CCAAJ, which is a regional center in Philadelphia. They've produced a website called A Race Against Time, preserving our audio visual media. And it is a website and series of videos based on the content of a workshop series that conducted in eight U.S. cities over the last several years. I've put up the link here. And you can, if you haven't checked it out through the online community's links, you can take a look at it after this webinar. Here are the topics that are on the website. And the idea was to teach curators, librarians, archivists, collections manager, and other steps, staff, basic principles and concepts for managing audio-visual collections and providing strategies for preservation and contracting for reformatting. There's short video presentations on the site, but then there are also some nice links to online articles. So today we're fortunate to be joined by Sarah Stodderman, the Smithsonian Institution's Archives Collections Manager, Collections Care Manager. And she was a presenter on the CCAAJ project. Her video is about videotape preservation and reformatting. And she's on hand with us today, International Archives Day, and here to answer any questions you have about the care of videotape. So again, if you have a question for Sarah, you can type it into the chat box to the left of this screen. And I'll get us started with just a few questions. Hi, everybody. Hi, Sarah. Thanks for joining us. I'm really glad to be here. Well, thanks. You had mentioned when we were chatting before this started that today being so hot is a terrible day for humans and for videotapes, which is a great way to lead in to say, now, how should tapes be stored? And are most library or archive environments that are controlled for human comfort sufficient for tapes? Yeah, it's an interesting fact about videotapes in particular and actually any magnetic media that they have a very short lifespan, about 10 to 30 years. We do have some tapes that are older than 30 years that play back OK, but we do also have tapes that are less than 10 years old that don't play back. And environment can really play a major role in preserving tapes. So actually the photograph that's up on everybody's screen of me holding a ledger book right behind me, inappropriately stored, actually, are some videotapes. They're flat on their flat sides and they actually should be upright like books. And the environment that they're in is a temperature cooler and drier is better. And there are a couple of different standards that we seek or that we've learned from about videotapes. The published literature or the published standards say it's defrozen or they shouldn't be frozen. And typically cool storage is maybe around somewhere between 42 and 50 degrees if possible with a fairly low relative humidity to around 30%. Now I know that most archives, libraries, and museums don't have dedicated cool storage. So the idea behind that is simply keeping things cooler and drier if possible. Great. And then I guess a big point that's made in the CCAHA video is to keep them dust-free. Is that usually sort of a plastic clamshell box? Right. So the handling container or they call them shipping containers are really valuable enclosures for the tapes and they don't need to be replaced, but they should be, if they're plastic, they should not be replaced, they should at least close very well. And we want to keep these items, we want to keep dust away from them because dust is hygroscopic so it can attract moisture from the air and the moisture actually can contribute to accelerated deterioration. We find that the big problem with magnetic tape is that there's something called sticky shed syndrome that occurs or acid hydrolysis of the binder that holds the magnetic particles, that holds your image material to the tape and dust could certainly accelerate that. Moisture in the air can accelerate that. Great. I see Christy Sorensen in Austin, Texas has asked, you know, is it necessary to have an archival plastic storage box for VHS tape or are, you know, the sleeves or boxes they come in okay so there's certain plastic standards that they should look out for? Yeah, you know, actually, that's a really good question. I would not, as a priority, I would not re-house my VHS tapes if they're in plastic boxes already, but the paper sleeves can present a problem. Usually they're open on one end and they are also, the paper is not a very good quality cardboard and so the cardboard is going to start to disintegrate and create dust itself. So what I would do is if you happen to have a source of VHS cassette boxes that are plastic and it really, for the purposes of long-term preservation, there doesn't seem to be any research pointing to one type of plastic over another. So I would simply try to select those items that had cardboard lip holders and replace them with plastic, but I wouldn't do a wholesale re-housing. Okay, that's good to know. There seems to be a question from Elaine Gustafson in Greensboro and it kind of leads into a question I had. It sounds like the best way to really preserve video since it's on such an instable medium is to digitize it, to transfer it to more, at least to a more stable medium or something that could be again transferred and transferred so that the original doesn't have to be played too often. Is that correct? Yes, reformatting is really the only way to preserve videotapes that suffer from obsolescence and from media deterioration. Elaine's question is really interesting and unfortunately I don't really have a good answer about copyrighted materials unless you have permission to duplicate them for preservation purposes. And in fact, with some video artists, they actually explicitly say that they maintain the right to duplicate for preservation. The copyright becomes a sticky wicket when it comes to moving image work. So if you know that you have copyright and you know that you have the ability to transfer them, then yes, you want to move them to a different medium and preferably to lots of different mediums, a lot of different file-based video formats that are out there. There's no holy grail for videotaped formats. In the last five years, there has been a federal digitization guideline initiative and actually there's a slide for that, Kristen, if you want to pull that up. Having to do with standards for reformatting videotapes, right now we are in the archival community looking at something called Motion JPEG 2000 for our videotape, moving it from an analog, like VHS analog videotape into a digital file-based format. JPEG 2000 is a lossless, compressed video that seems to be pretty robust for archives. For other people, I've been looking at 10-bit 4-2-2 uncompressed video and I know this is a lot of gobbledygook, but there are, in terms of when it comes to video encoding and decoding, it's really wise to spend some time learning more about the different systems that contemporary video makers and users are using and become friendly with your local engineers so that you can begin to understand some of the systems that are available out there for re-encoding or transcoding from analog or early digital video into contemporary digital format. And then there's a whole host of other video file formats, digital video file formats, which are highly compressed but that can be used for access copies. And so our strategy has been to move things from their original medium, be it an analog videotape, a digital videotape, into digital file formats and to move them into several different ones. One a very high-end preservation copy and then some lower-end, more compressed, but easily accessed files. Great. I was going to just go back to Christy's question. I mean, sorry, Elaine's question. Yeah. It sounds like she's working with living visual artists, but I do happen to know that in some fields they're trying to become more organized about how to handle the issue of copyright for just this, for making preservation copies and that the dance field has a document. The Dance Heritage Coalition has a document on copyright that essentially validates reproducing videotapes of dance performances and work with dancers for preservation copies. So if that's an interest anyone on the chat today, we can send you that link. But it may be worth, that might be worth a question if it's with visual, contemporary visual artists to bring that up to colleagues in the College Art Association or other groups that are working with contemporary living artists. Because that is a very important thing to address for that entire field, not just one institution. And let me also share that the electronic media group of the American Institute for Conservation debates and discusses these particular issues. Copyrightism is a huge issue for contemporary time-based media which is another term for video art or single channel or multi-channel artwork that end up in art museums. And they are really concerned about making sure that the preservation of these materials are in the right hands and who owns it and who has the right to do the proper work. There is also some work in copyright fields saying that sometimes duplication for preservation is okay. And this has been true for certain types of other materials such as books. So it may be that in this case, or it may just simply be that she needs to contact the artist to begin with and say, hey, I want to preserve these items. Have you considered this? Could you give me copyright? At least you preserved them. Yeah, that's a great idea. You had your answer previously. You had used two terms that maybe the group online is familiar with but maybe not. And then could you go over again the terms lossy and lossless? Right, and why that's an important issue when it comes to digitizing video. Sure. Well, and actually it speaks to another good question that Elaine from Greensboro asked, which is how do you maintain the integrity and the original intent of a video work? When we digitize things, because there's so much information that's being captured, frequently the encoders are taking information and discarding some of it. So let's say it's a video of a field and it's a blue cloudless day, the sky is blue and it doesn't change very much. The video encoding system may choose to take that blue sky and sort of compress it into one large blue block. And that would be a way to keep the file sizes small because otherwise you can get very, very large file sizes, easily 250 gigabytes for a one hour video and that kind of thing. So if you use lossy video compression, you are losing bits. You're losing parts of the picture. If you use lossless video compression, what's happening is that there are some very fancy mathematical algorithms that are trying to figure out a way to recreate little portions of the picture in a way that allows you to compress the image and then decompress it after when it's played back or when it's put back onto your monitor. So we prefer lossless compression. Lossless compression has its own problems. It's technically very sophisticated and it also sometimes can take up more space. Just the compression part of it can take up more space than if you just were to use uncompressed video. So it gets to be, again, pretty technical. But overall, the framework for decision making here is we would prefer to use lossless or uncompressed video over lossy digitization for our preservation efforts. And you said earlier, I think if I got it right, that sometimes you use a combination. Your preservation master is lossless, but your access copies might be okay to have them. Lossy, is that a realistic strategy? Absolutely. So, for instance, with every PC by these days, it looks like you're going to get Windows Media. Windows Media is a very compressed system, but it is ubiquitous everywhere. So, if you wanted to create an access copy that was a Windows Media file, that would make sense. There are other media files, real media, for instance. Some type of QuickTime movies and so forth can be lossy but sufficient for access purposes. You can serve them over the Internet with FTP files or that kind of thing. Great. So we had another question from Laura Wall in Wellington. And this is something you mentioned in the CCH video as well. You were mentioning how the Smithsonian has limited amount of playback equipment, probably less than most places. And so you can run into a situation where you have one kind of videotape and one kind of player and they all need maintenance. So how have you all handled that? And are there kind of vendors that you can speak out of here? Sure. This is a big problem, actually. Equipment maintenance, understanding all of the intricacies of these pieces of equipment, some of which are valuable in and of themselves because they're now becoming also quite rare. One-inch and two-inch videotape machines, especially two-inch, well, I'd say one-inch too. They're big machines and they have a big footprint and I'm sure people have wanted to get rid of them for a while. My suggestion is to become friendly with your local broadcasting station to talk to vendors. For instance, go to the EMEA Net. The Association of Moving Image Archivists has an excellent website that also includes a place for vendors. And I think Kristen, you've pulled that up on the screen. Is there a way that we can show them how to get to the vendor screen on there? Sure, I'll pull it up now. Because they have a list of experts in the field and there would be people who would be very interested, for instance, in having a usable one-inch tape player. And that leads to serve another point, which is that it really makes sense to pool your resources. If you are a museum in a city or an archive in a place like Wilmington, you're close to Philadelphia and you're close to Baltimore as well as you've got other museums and libraries and so forth in Wilmington. And you may all have the same needs. Perhaps pooling resources, looking at shared equipment, looking at equipment that you no longer need but somebody else might need is really a great way to build this community of AV users. In fact, that's how I got a hold of a cleaning machine that we use here in the archives. There was a library in Connecticut that was getting rid of a VHS tape cleaning machine and I was able to get it for a very concessionary fee and we're using that every day now to clean our videotapes before we reformat them. So that's the kind of keeping your eye open and trying to make connections to other people who have similar issues. Great. Do you see my screen up here now? I don't see your... Has the slide changed? Not yet. Okay. Sorry. I need to hit one more button. Here we go. How about now? Now it is. Now we see the website. Okay. So I believe it was under publications and resources. Right. And I'm linking on that now and then click on that first link. Am I correct? And here is a whole list of types of organizations and companies. Exactly. They are, if you delve deeper into the association of moving in the dark abyss or even become involved in their organization, they're very actively involved in these issues. So I think, definitely think that that would be worth looking at for vendors to deal with older machines. Great. Mine. Robert also had a good point. Okay. The Association of Broadcasters as a resource to... You know, they have been... That's a very good question. Yes, I have. And in fact, I've also worked with the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, and there's nothing like getting the people who actually created these machines and these and who have been using them for the last 50 years that they've been around to really make you feel a little humble about our broadcasting heritage. So yes, National Association of Broadcasters and the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, and they usually do have local guild engineers who are very interested in these problems, who may have equipment, may also have the expertise to come in and look at your machinery. That's a great idea. Great. So do you typically... I mean, it sounds like the zoning you've been able to get equipment, enough equipment together to have your own digitization lab, but for most places that are rather small, would they then just contract with a vendor that they could find on the AMIA site and actually send them their videotapes or what sort of things do they need to think about when selecting a vendor? So they need to go through the whole process that they would do for any conservation treatment if they were sending artifacts off-site. They need to consider the whole scope of work and what they're intending to achieve with this activity. And it starts really with prioritizing what your videotapes are. And in fact, there's a question right now, what video formats should be given highest priority for preservation reformatting? I think that the older videotapes, 2-inch quad, 1-inch simpy type ABC, 1.5-inch open-reel EIAJ or CV, I'm just listing them, but there are some video format guides out there on the web and they will tell you which are the oldest videotapes. And then I would consider how you would send anything out for reformatting. So consider what is the condition of those original materials. Maybe you don't know what they are. Do you expect your vendor to inspect the materials and tell you what their condition is? What is, do you want to get a price per object or a price for time? And then what's going to be your preservation format? What do you expect it to be delivered on? And the vendors that are working with video these days, they work with a lot of different types of people from broadcasters to cultural heritage organizations to private collections. And my experience has been pretty good overall with being able to assign vendors who are sensitive to our needs. I think that my greatest concern is not having enough vendors for the great quantity of video that we have out in the world. And that's why prioritization is so important. We are daily losing the number of machines and magnetic head hours that we have available to reformat. So there's not really a, most of these vendors are familiar with historic materials and there's not too much of a danger of something happening. I mean, I guess you can get references, see if they've worked with other museum and archives and maybe ask us to check references. Absolutely. Get references, make sure you feel comfortable with how they're talking about your materials. If they refer to it as stuff, then maybe not so much. There are a lot of things that you go through just to get a vendor for, let's say, converting microfilm or for digitizing photographs. So I would use the same through principles and so on. There are some statements of work that are available actually through the National Archives and Records Administration. And I don't have that website up here, but it's archive.gov. And there is, in their audio-visual section, they do actually have some information about things that you should expect for vendors to do. Okay. And we can maybe post that link up on our discussion page of the online community. So good. And then I'm going to guess Christy in Austin, Texas, might be with the university there. If they've got an IT department or maybe it's not a company that's devoted to this wholly, would that archive site also help you walk through some questions that you'd want to ask? I think so. I mean, I think that the archive site, in general, their motion picture and moving image area, there's some interesting tidbits about overall that I would highly suggest people taking a look at. But something is capturing my attention. There's a little conversation happening in the chat about VHS to DVD. Oh, yeah. So I feel compelled to talk about it. So DVD is a very compressed format. And what's interesting, of course, is that VHS is not such a great format to begin with. It's analog. If analog could be called Lossy, VHS would be a Lossy analog format. It doesn't record colors very well. It has the bare minimum of what you need to be able to see, to be able to render a moving image, basically. So almost anything that you reformat it to would capture the information in some way. But DVD is just not a preservation medium, and it is quite Lossy. If you only have DVDs, then you're not sort of following the principle of loss of copies. And DVDs themselves, the medium, are notoriously problematic at this point. They're even good quality DVDs can delaminate and can be difficult to maintain over time. The other thing about a DVD is the way that it's encoded, it's sort of locked behind a, it's a MOB format, I believe, a MOB format. And it's difficult to unlock it. So if you wanted to just get to the digital code, you have to have a system to get out of the DVD formatting. So I wouldn't, if you have no other opportunity to do any kind of reformatting, then doing something in some regards is better than nothing. But I think that you can develop a more robust preservation strategy than simply duplicating onto DVD, because then you're going to be in a situation where you're doing it again sooner or later, and you're starting off with a compressed video as your preservation medium. And that's just not really where we want to go with these systems. What about even keeping DVDs for access copy? DVDs for access is great. And I completely understand how frustrating it is for people who don't have any staff. They don't have, and they do have the equipment. They have equipment that can go from VHS to DVD and the urge to do something is super. But if you have, if you only have 30 videotapes, then it's worth writing a grant and giving some thought to doing it better. And if you have 800 videotapes, are you really going to convert all of them to DVD? I'm curious about that. So it's really about strategy. It's really about thinking about your overall preservation approach. And making sure that those videotapes are truly getting what they deserve. That's the other point. Make sure that your materials are the things that you want to be saving. So it's not just about format and obsolescence. It's about content or value. What is it that you are trying to preserve? If they are unique materials, that's, and your mission is to preserve them, that gives it a very high value. If they are sort of copied materials or it's not quite known whether or not you have complete ownership of them, then they have lower value. So those are, that sort of discernment needs to occur as well. And someone has mentioned the, is there such thing as this DVD that's supposed to be archival in the last 100 years? This is theoretical, of course. I believe that these 100-year CDs and DVDs can get damaged easily. And I have some 100-year CDs where a poorly affixed label peeled off all of the lamination. So if you can manage to keep them sort of perfectly in the temperature that they were intended to be in and don't put a label on them and try to keep them isolated, then maybe they will last for 100 years. I don't know if DVD players will be around in 100 years. It seems even just in our entertainment industry the DVD is kind of going out on the wayside. Yeah, the way it's coming in and it's a sort of fascinating issue. So I think Blu-ray is less compressed and can hold more information. There's high definition. There's a whole bunch of things coming down the pipe. Now, VHS and high definition are two totally different animals in terms of the way that they're presented and so forth. So that's another discussion that I'm not going to get into. Right. I don't know if you've already addressed this, if you have, I apologize. But I just want to go back to Bev Allen's question in Pueblo. You had mentioned VHS is not the best. It's pretty lossy to begin with. So you're really just, when you're digitizing, you're really just doing the best you can, right? Try not to lose any more information. That's right. Well, every time you copy from an analog to another analog, you sort of, you already are doing, you are already losing some information. Basically, actually to be completely truthful about the electronics of this, VHS to almost any digital file format that is such as a lossless 10-bit 422 QuickTime file. That file is really big and you're not losing any information. You're not going to lose information from your VHS tape going into that system. That system samples a lot of the video. It's doing a good job of capturing everything that's in the video. Most of the, and this is also true for things like UMATIC, which isn't early, it was in 1970s, 1980s, 1990s format. Most of our digital files that we use are big enough to capture all of the data that's in those analog files. So that's the good, that's the news, that we're not going to be losing a lot of information in transcoding them from the analog into the digital world. Great. What did you think of George Perkins' question? Did you see that there? Yeah. ADI is, I can remember. I believe it's the equivalent of QuickTime for Windows. Yeah, I think that actually is worth looking at. So ADI is essentially sort of a wrapper for an encoded video, but it's in a Windows environment rather than a Mac environment. Sort of speaking off the top of my head there, I'd have to do a little research, but I think that that's, it's not an ideal wrapper, but it's not a terrible one. So yeah, I think that that's a pretty interesting notion. Hard drives are interesting. The issue is spinning disks can be a problem, so you need to make sure that your hard drive isn't failing. And that's, but it has the capacity to hold large quantities of digital files. We asked about writing at grants. Yeah, I can go live again to my screen and show the portion of the CCHA site that has information on that. Yeah, perfect. That's helpful. Yeah. Thank you, Robert, for answering MOVA's Mac, Friendly, and ADI's CC. I just wanted to make sure that I got that right, too. You have an eight millimeter, Robert has an eight millimeter color film from 1966. So that's, it's not video, it's motion picture. So you probably can hold the frames up to the light and actually see an image. So those materials, if properly housed in cool or cold storage, can last a very, very long time. And this sort of speaks to one thing. Please don't throw away your originals until, and not even until, please just don't throw away your originals. I think that's a really important feature of reformatting. We haven't come to a place where we feel comfortable positioning original objects, even ones that we really can't play back. But certainly an eight millimeter film is usable and can be reformatted using a tele-scene and a film production company to reformat it into a digital file. Great. So I have the funding opportunities page up. And the Institute of Museum and Library Services has a few different programs that might be applicable for looking for funding to reformat. And more can be found at imls.gov. The National Dump for the Humanities also has a number of grants. This would be a great, reformatting might be a great option for preservation assistance grants, which the application deadline to just pass tends to be in the spring in May, April or May. But that's a small grant, fairly easy to write, and it's perfect. You know, if you've done an assessment of your collections and you've prioritized the care of your videotape, that might be a great place to get a small grant that you can get right to work on some of these projects. But then they also have, if you have a more expensive collection, some of their other grant programs could really help with that. And then if applicable, depending on what the topic is of your video collection, National Dump for the Arts might as well. Do you have other suggestions, Sarah? No, I think that there is still a grant granting program that I unfortunately can't confirm that through AMIA, Association of Moving Image Archivists, for film reformatting, where film vendors gave pro bono reformatting to worthy grantees. Okay. We can take a look also. Again, I'm just showing the AMIA website, if anyone wants to look it up. It's just AMIAnet.org. But I can also check on that. We can post that back to the discussion section of it. And there's another group that I think people should be aware of, which is the Association of Recorded Sound Collections, which have very lively meetings and are also really working hard on these issues for audio materials. Thanks, Bob. Bob, baby, just put up a short link to the ASLH on their site. They've got. Perfect. So Christy has, you know, what's the deal? I'm saying everything is problematic. So hard drives are only problematic if they don't get looked at. And I'm going to introduce a concept here, a managed preservation environment for your electronic records. Nothing is ever done, certainly not by Friday, but nothing is ever done in general when it comes to electronic records. Constant vigilance is the key. And a managed preservation environment means that you're checking your hard drives, your network drives, you're backing them on a partner regular basis. You are making sure that they're not failing. You're making sure that the systems that run them, whatever operating system or whatever, however their architecture or technology is, is being maintained. And if that means that you have to put something into, if you want to use the cloud or if you want to use your closet with a hard drive and that in any way that you use those systems, you need to be comfortable with them and document them, not only for yourself, but for people who will be coming after you. So people know that you did backup. So people know that you're doing this kind of systematic review of your managed environment. The worst thing is when you've done or created a lot of digital objects and something crashes, and if you don't have copies, you don't have backups, then you're not going to be in a situation where you can do any kind of work. So that's the important thing. And DVDs just simply, they're just not considered an archival medium. I think in the video on the CCHA site, you did mention about what the Smithsonian is currently doing. Is that something you're able to, do you have a system in place? Yeah, we do. We're really fortunate that we are, first of all, we have a lot of support across the institution from other archives and libraries that are here to create a small digitization center. It's not huge. We don't have all of the formats. I can't reformat, for instance, half-inch open reel video. And I'm limited to VHS, beta cam SP, digital beta cam, and UMATIC as my primary format deck. And we're encoding the video using a system called a SAMA solo. And we chose the system because it simultaneously encodes to four different, well, actually an endless number of video streams. But it's essentially a computer-based video encoding system, which is putting our video out into JPEG 2000, MPEG 2, Windows Media and Real Media, and also H.264, the surface. Five different file formats, actually. Other people have built their own systems that basically are with some IT help and some engineering help. They have a deck connected to a monitor and a computer, and they're moving using a video encoding card and fairly straightforward systems that are out there. For instance, Final Cut Pro is a type of software that can do some of this work. And they're reformatting video that way. So there are ways that we're beginning to get... I think in the last decade we were really dependent on either going from one video format to another video format, and now we are moving more from formats into files, and we're able to do it ourselves a little bit more. When we come to problematic videos, videos that aren't playing back well on the deck, there's tracking problems or there's dropouts or snow, problems that really should only be handled by a person who's very experienced with videotape, then we take those videos and we pay a vendor to duplicate them for us because they have better equipment, they understand how everything works a little bit better than we do. And so the vast majority of our videos we can reformat ourselves, and for those small pool of problematic videotapes, we can send them to a vendor. So it sounds like part of your strategy is to use many different file formats, and then you're sort of hedging your bets and you're maintaining your check models, all those. Did I understand you correctly? Yeah, exactly. So there's a question about identifying sticky shed without playback, and unfortunately there's no diagnostic tool for identifying sticky shed in a cassette. On a reel-to-reel tape you can sometimes hold the tape up and see if the tape falls gracefully from the edge of the tape pack, but that isn't always an indication. If it doesn't fall gracefully towards gravity, then that means that it may be sticking to itself. But I wish there was a diagnostic like an acid detection strip or a pH pen, but there unfortunately isn't. So then typically you discover this by putting in the tape and it's not playing correctly. Yeah, it will either evolve into sort of a snowy image or it'll stop the servo of the tape deck with the stick and you'll get the tape out and then you'll look and the head will have gunk all over it, black or sticky gunk. And one of the problems, of course, is that a damaged tape will hurt your video deck as much as a... and then could actually give the disease to other tapes. So we really insist on our tape deck being clean and to carefully monitor to make sure that none of the tapes is left behind any kind of residue. And you mentioned in the video using a cleaner, I think it was called an RTI tape check cleaner. That's a machine that cleans the tape. Yeah, this is coming out of the data tape industry. Essentially what this is doing is it's a machine that you run your videotape through that is rubbing a soft, non-woven polyester cloth against the front and the back of the tape to remove debris and knock off little bits that are going to interfere with the playback. And there's been a lot of testing done of this, but the little bit of testing has shown that it seems to improve the head to tape contact and so you're actually going to get a better picture after you've cleaned the tape anyway. So that's been, the company is facing it a little away. Is it a piece of equipment that's pretty affordable or is it something people should seek out from a... Yeah, maybe someone in there. You should try to find a used one if you can because they're a little expensive, but I think that this is one of these cases where you could, if you could pool your money with other groups that had tapes that need to be cleaned, that would be really good. And you had to just be cleaning the tape before you do any digitizing. Do you want to have the sort of best read of the tape when you're converting it? Well, see, we're in this strange place where really to do everything that you want to do with your tape would probably cost a lot more money than a lot of these smaller archives and museums can do. So you have to make some choices. If you're not going to clean the tape beforehand for whatever reason, then you need to document it. So the tape check machines probably cost in the neighborhood around $5,000. Okay. And so that's not sort of the thing that necessarily you're going to invest in unless you've really written a grant policy. But possibly if you checked with other, maybe larger institutions in your area or maybe in your state archives, would there be chance they would have it? Well, exactly. I think that there are universities that have purchased them. And actually, I should say, I believe that the company actually rents their tape machine for cleaning. Okay. So there's an option for you. Okay, great. And then you mentioned the tape had cleaner for the actual machine. Right. And then they can still be purchased from places that sell video equipment. And they're essentially a type of videotape that sort of abrasive and it scrapes off the surface of the tape head. Just a little tiny bit, you know, microscopically. Right. So if you had put in a tape with sticky shed, is your machine done? Or no, it's not done. It's not done forever. And in fact, no. But then you need to clean it. And sometimes, you know, this is where, again, you get to a problematic tape. The question is whether or not you want to be the person dealing with it or if you want to send it to a vendor. Because vendors, their tape machine, they know how to maintain them routinely. And they actually will open the top of the deck. They will look inside a clean off. They'll use isopropyl alcohol to clean off the head. And that kind of thing. So unless you feel very confident about the, and you have the manual for your machines and know how to clean your machines, then I would try to limit putting any kind of damaged tape in your machine. Okay. Good to know. Well, we've got about five minutes left. So I'm just going to give a warning to the group. If you had any last questions, I want to put it in our chat now. That would be great. I did, if you don't mind, Sarah, there was a question about audio wire recording. Yeah. Did you say that from Lynn? Did you want to try to tackle that? It looks like electrical wires. Okay. You have a recorder phone, magnetic sound recorder. That's cool. Yes. Well, the nice part about the, there are several companies that actually have wire machine vendors. And the Association of Recorded Sound Collections will have vendors listing it. And also they have listservs that, you know, you could post on the listservs. I'm looking for somebody who can deal specifically with wire. The neat thing about the wire is it's stainless steel and it doesn't deteriorate. The biggest problem is when it tangles. Once it's tangled, it's really hard to untangle it. It probably has not been de-magnetized because of the way that the strength of its magnetization is pretty high. It has a strong hysteresis, which is termed for how it can be magnetized. So it's likely that there's still sound on there if there was sound on there to begin with. I would not play them back myself because of the expertise it takes for these wire recorders to work. But there are also a lot of enthusiasts for wire recording. And so I would definitely look into, especially if you think these are important wire materials, they were used a lot of time for like dictation and actually they were phone message machines too. So I think that pretty much sums up the wire recording issue. And I'm seeing Robert from Portage, he's talking about using very pure alcohol for cleaning your machine. Yeah, isopropyl alcohol, the ones that I was talking about is the reagent grade. And you absolutely don't want to put just rubbing alcohol on your machine. And cleaning the guides and the rollers, that's why you need your manual so that you actually know what your guides and your rollers are. If you don't know what your guides and rollers are, then you should definitely be handing them over to a videotape expert. Okay, and where would you get that more pure form of alcohol? Usually from a chemical. Yeah, you'd order it from a chemical supply company. And if you're working with, for instance, if you're working with a conservation guild like the Conservation Center for Artificial Artifacts or someplace like that, they may have people on hand who would be able to assist you with identifying and purchasing the right kind of alcohol. Okay. Now that you mentioned conservators, I was going to show just the slide on where you can find a conservator. In the American Institute for Conservation of Art, Historic and Artistic Works does have a site and to find a conservator link will take you to a database and you can search for conservators in your area or conservators that have specialty in this type of material. So if you have additional questions, if you want someone to come and take a specific look, that's a great resource. Contacting your state archivist would be a good resource. And then, of course, you can join the other National Association. And put it in just yet another plug for the electronic media group of the AIC, which is really tackling some of the bigger issues of sort of intent and copyright and quality assurance, those sorts of things and trying to come up with guidelines. Great. Well, Sarah, I just had one last question and that is, so much the time it's the local library, the archival museum or stroke of society that gets questions from the public about their personal home videotape. They're basically the same kinds of guidelines that we've been giving today. We've been talking about sort of more, you know, the professional management of videotape. And I'm assuming that there's sort of some of the same basic guidelines making sure that they're kept in a more cool, vibrant environment in a plastic box, if possible, not a paper box. Keeping them away from electronic, other electronic instruments so that they don't get erased here or there. And then, you know, copying them. They've got to copy them. Just like museums and archives do, too. So they may choose to put them on more accessible copies, but this is where making lots of copies is really valuable. And I think in the next five years you'll be talking about people being able to copy their videos and put them up there in the cloud and not just on YouTube in such a way that they are preserving them. And this will be available to the home video market. And that'll be really interesting. Great. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Sarah. And you had mentioned to us it is International Archives Day. Is that correct? That's right. We've been tweeting all day long and talking about archives and all of the interesting problems throughout the world that archives have been fun. Great. Well, we're at our five o'clock time, and so I'm going to sign off now, but we will be archiving this on our website. So it'll be under the Care of Audiovisual Materials, this whole recording of this webinar. And we can continue conversations in the discussion section on the site. I know I mentioned a couple of things I will follow up on. I'll double-check on whether the American... or the moving... Association for Moving Image Archivists has a grant program still and a few other things we mentioned. So I'll post something in the next year to you following up on that. But if there are remaining questions or things that you think of later, feel free to put it in the discussion, and I can follow up with Sarah and get an answer for you. So thanks. I'm looking forward to it. Well, thanks again. And for the rest of you on the call, we'll have our next webinar on Wednesday, the 22nd of June, in the afternoon, and look for updates on our website and our calendar for future events that we're currently scheduling for the rest of the summer. So thanks again, Sarah. Have a great afternoon, everyone. You're real welcome. See you later.