We are pleased to announce that a full draft set of documentation for PROUD and PRAVDA is now available, on our YouTube channel and in PDF:
We will be performing usability tests on kits plus documentation this summer, and revising the documentation in late summer and fall. (Our thanks to IMLS for allowing us a grant extension!) Please get in touch (salo at wisc dot edu) if you have suggestions for improving the documentation.
Would you like your own audio/video or digital-data rescue kit? We would love for you to build one! To that end, we offer “Building Audio, Video, and Data-Rescue Kits,” which contains our distilled wisdom from the construction of PROUD and PRAVDA.
Comments, questions, and suggestions are most welcome! Please email them to Dorothea Salo: salo at wisc dot edu.
RADD’s first pieces of equipment were two Iomega Zip drives that were in a pile in the hall waiting for the trash collectors to arrive. At the time, I wasn’t even planning to build RADD; I just knew that plenty of people still had Zip disks, and I didn’t want the drives to be thrown away!
Installations like RADD can look out of reach due to the difficulty of finding older A/V equipment in usable condition at a reasonable price. Some pieces are inescapably expensive, it is true! (I would love a film digitizer and a microfilm/microfiche digitizer. I can’t afford them.) But savvy searching can help save money for the expensive stuff.
Rule one is “be patient.” If you need a piece of equipment immediately, expect to pay a premium for it. (I have, once or twice, when I’ve had a project in hand.) If you can wait for a deal, you’ll likely find one. Rule two is “find repairfolk.” You will need them! Ask your network.
Rule three is “ask your community first.” RADD, PROUD, and PRAVDA have benefited immeasurably from the generosity of people in the campus and Madison communities. You’ll be amazed at what people have!
Everyone knows about thrift stores, eBay, and Craigslist, but these are far from your only sources of viable equipment. Additional sources include:
Good luck!
At the request of an interested librarian, we are posting electronic copies of the conference posters we are currently using to introduce RADD, PROUD, and PRAVDA:
(This list is current as of January 27, 2017.)
Some of the playback equipment listed below is small, low-use, expensive and/or rare, and portable, ergo locked up. If you need it, please speak to Dorothea Salo in advance. Thank you!
(RADD does not currently work with 8mm, Super8, or 16mm film. Try Holder PrintWorks. We also do not currently have DVCAM playback equipment.)
Coming soon (awaiting a working SCSI setup):
Most digital data-rescue kits will want a 5.25″ floppy drive. The main difficulty with these is that extant ones are practically all designed to be installed inside a computer case. To ship one safely, it makes sense to find an enclosure for it.
As best we know, no enclosure is available for purchase ready-designed for a single 5.25″ floppy drive and its connectors. (RADD uses this dual-drive enclosure, which works fine but is rather too heavy to ship.) The best anyone can do is bodge one.
To match PROUD’s setup, you will need:
PROUD is using this CoolGear enclosure. This Addonics enclosure has also been recommended.
The exact manner of putting the drive and enclosure together depends on the exact enclosure chosen, but here is the basic idea:
The result is not beautiful, but it is functional.
Equipment included in the PROUD digital-data rescue kit:
Installed software:
RADD, PROUD, and PRAVDA made their conference debuts in November at the Digital Libraries Forum 2016 and the Association of Moving Image Archivists Annual Symposium 2016.
Slides with notes from the DLF version of the presentation:
We are grateful to both conferences for their interest, to our co-presenters, and to the highly engaged audiences who gave us their time.
FireWire is a near-obsolete connection and data-transfer standard. Unfortunately, it is also the best way to capture digital video data from MiniDV camcorders, and many perfectly adequate audio interfaces also rely on it. Normally we would hope for adapters to an up-to-date connection standard like USB, but in FireWire’s case we’re out of luck.
For desktop machines running Windows, the solution is relatively simple: a PCI or PCIe card with FireWire ports such as the one StarTech sells. These are readily available used and new, and not difficult to install.
For relatively current Macs, desktop or laptop, the easiest solution is Apple’s FireWire to Thunderbolt adapter (plus a cheap adapter or cable that allows plugging into the 4-wire port in most camcorders and the 9-wire port in the Apple dongle). We have successfully used this setup with a previous-generation MacBook Pro; what we do not presently know is whether it can be adapted to the current-generation USB-C-only laptop line.
For Windows laptops, such as we are planning to use for video capture in PRAVDA, we have no solution for most current-generation machines. Roughly one or two generations back, however, two potential solutions exist:
Audio-gear manufacturer Presonus has a useful list of Windows laptop models that meet one or the other of the above requirements. For any A/V capture laptop intended for a portable rig like PRAVDA, we also recommend checking that it has an optical drive capable of writing as well as reading CDs and DVDs; nearly all on Presonus’s list should qualify. If such a drive is not built into the laptop, the rig would need to include an external optical drive—possible, but a waste of precious packing space.
Good luck!
We are tremendously excited to announce that the Institute for Museum and Library Services has awarded RADD a Sparks! Ignition grant to build and document two kits, one for audiovisual digitization (“PRAVDA,” for “Portably Reformat A/V to Digital from Analog”), one for digital-data rescue (“PROUD,” for “Portable Recovery of Unique Data”).
Our hope is that proving the feasibility of constructing such kits will spark kit construction at centers of cultural heritage such as state libraries and archives, DPLA Service Hubs, library consortia, and LIS schools. In turn, the kits will enable small cultural-heritage institutions to rescue and share at least some of their most at-risk collections, and to help patrons rescue their own personal and family history.
We are glad to share with the community the abstract and (slightly redacted) narrative from our grant application. We make no pretense of perfection—indeed, if we were to write this grant today we would change a few things!—but we hope sharing these helps others write successful applications.
