vocabulary makes it much easier for users to find the content they want.


DIMOC uses that controlled vocabulary describing the imagery to make it pos- sible to locate it in the database, with the ultimate job of making content accessible after T3Media Inc. has digitized and stored it. Controlled vocabulary key- words start at the very top of a taxonomy tree—people, places, and events. “Under


things, activities things, there are


equipment and platforms, as two exam- ples,” Hickey said. “Under platform, you have air, land and sea. Under air, you’re going to have fixed-wing and rotary-wing and unmanned aircraft. Tis hierarchical organization of the imagery effectively increases the search-ability or the access points to find and use our content. Stan- dardizing the terminology and overall metadata is an equation that results in increased access to content.”


DIGITIZATION = PRESERVATION Another job for the archivist, Hickey said, is to balance preservation and accessibil- ity when prioritizing media for digitizing and then tagging. “Sometimes making something accessible is preserving it,” she said. “Digitization is the ultimate preser- vation objective that we can accomplish.”


For example, she continued, a 16 mm film might have “vinegar syndrome,” which is a chemical reaction that doesn’t include vinegar but smells like it. “It’s a process of deterioration,” she said. Also, deteriorat- ing items sometimes contain hazardous materials, such as mercury. Tose move to the head of the line for digitization.


“But when you have a film that’s begun to deteriorate, … you can only hope to slow it down.” Ideally, Hickey contin- ued, “you’d digitize it as soon as possible.” Although they are carefully stored, these physical media items won’t, as Hickey


BORN ANALOG Matt West, an encoding specialist for T3Media Inc., works with the System for the Automated Migration of Media Archives May 21 at the DMRC. Once media is digitized, it can be captioned and tagged to make it discoverable by searchers, a process that often requires research. (DOD photo by Steve McGill)


put it, “last for all of eternity. To use an extreme example, we may only get one chance to play back a videotape due to deterioration. Te digital file created from this last viewing is the preserva- tion of the content. Te physical medium might be lost, but the content saved.”


FORMAT = COLLECTION


“Our collection’s pretty stable,” said Hickey, “and that is a credit to the ser- vices and how they stored it at our storage facility,” the Defense Media Records Center in Riverside, CA. Tat stabil- ity allows for prioritization to be “more collection-based or content-driven than format-based, and you ride the balance between those,” she said.


“By and large, right now at the beginning of the contract, we are digitizing by for- mat,” Hickey said. Oddly enough, format


also equates to collection, because a par- ticular format most often comes from a particular era. So World War II imag- ery or audio is likely to be in a different format from material originating in the Korean or Vietnam era.


“For example,” she said, “Let’s say you


have all of this World War II material. Tat would be really great to have [digi- tized], because people probably haven’t seen it for a long time. But you have to weigh that against what the contrac- tor can handle, because World War II content is going to be in myriad legacy formats that may or may not take lon- ger or extra processing.” It’s much more expensive, for example, to digitize a 16 mm movie in terms of both money and manpower. And so far, the contractor, T3Media Inc., has been “phenomenal” in doing so, Hickey said.


ASC.ARMY.MIL 85


CONTRACTING


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