Australian audiovisual digitisation agency  DAMsmart has been appointed by the National Library Board of Singapore to digitise a 2-inch Quad and 1-inch B video collection for the National Archives of Singapore.

The National Archives of Singapore holds a vast audiovisual collection that contains a full range of analogue video formats. The Archive identified a portion of its 2-inch Quad and 1-inch B collection for priority digitisation and subsequently sort services to undertake the challenging migration process. 

In 2012, the first stage of the digitisation project was put out to tender and DAMsmart was successfully appointed to the project, going on to successfully complete the project. This year, the second stage of the digitisation project was put out to tender, and again, DAMsmart was appointed as the successful tenderer for the project.

DAMsmart will provide an end-to-end solution, from packing to archiving. The project sees DAMsmart relocating the collection from Singapore to Canberra across two consignments, providing its own professional packing services onsite in Singapore to pack and manage the temporary relocation. 

Once in Canberra, DAMsmart will prepare and rejuvenate the media, which exhibits all the classic signs of degradation expected of tapes of this age. The encoding process will deliver the National Archives of Singapore Lossless JPEG2000 delivered back on LTO5 written under Storage DNA’s implementation of LTFS for preservation, and hard drives containing IMX, H.264 and Windows Streaming Media files, as well as Digital Betacam copies for traditional access.

Joe Kelly, General Manager of DAMsmart, said, “We are very excited to be working with the National Archives of Singapore again. These formats represent the origin of TV broadcasting in Singapore and date back 30 or 40 years. 

"Today, these obsolete formats present three major challenges – the condition of original tapes that have been stored in the tropics for decades, the availability of reliable playback equipment is virtually non-existent, and so are the specialist skills to operate the VTRs, especially in the case of 2-inch and 1 inch B formats.”