Day of Digital Archives!

Analog video preservation and a site visit to a repair facility at the NASA Ames Research Center

by Lauren Sorensen, Preservation Specialist

Happy Day of Digital Archives! Our preservation department specifically works to preserve and provide support to archives with film, video, and moving image and audio material in their collections (including advising on borne digital materials as well), and we are one of the only non-profit vendors for high-quality preservation of analog video and audio in the country.

In April of this year, I met in person for the first time Ken Zin, who works on the NASA Ames Research Center campus repairing obsolete reel-to-reel videotape machines. His work is essential to our organization because he is one of the only people left in the country doing this specialized type of repair work. Magnetic media that is only playable on these decks feature heads (the part of the machine that reads the magnetic waveforms on the tape) that are proprietary to the companies that made them in the 1970s and 1980s, so it is challenging to keep them up to speed and repair, considering they have not been manufactured for over 30 years. Realignment and regular maintenance is important in maintaining a facility that is appropriate for preservation services; we maintain these decks as we would museum artifacts because they are some of the last working machinery that is available to transfer 1/2" open-reel machines; after these decks are no longer operational, any magnetic recordings held in archival collections will be lost. We took photos of the facility (a former MacDonald's location on the NASA Ames Rearch Center campus!) and hope to next interview Ken about his work in more detail. For now, please enjoy the photos!

Now-empty rockets just outside of the repair facility on the NASA Ames campus.

Ken Zin, video engineer and man of the hour.

A reproduction of the first image of the earth from the moon.

2" Quad machine repaired and maintained by Ken at his facility.

Corner of plants that highlights the fact that this building used to be the Campus' sole MacDonald's.

Model rocket thruster.

Some of the first images of the moon originating on 2" quad tape; Zin restored these.

Another type of 2" quad playback deck.

View from the former MacDonald's - an enormous hangar framed by blue sky.

Thanks to Ken Zin for all of his excellent work and for giving us access to his facility.