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Library Maintains Vital Visual Archive With SnapStream

University of Hawaii preserves TV broadcasts about island history and culture.

Project Date: 2009

The Sinclair Library at the University of Hawaii at Manoa maintains the only extensive archive of television broadcasts about Hawaii in the state. For more than 30 years, its Hawaii Media Program has compiled a vital visual record of the islands’ history and contemporary culture. The program preserves footage about subjects as varied as the state’s heritage (such as hula festivals), its politics (such as Hawaiian sovereignty issues), and its important figures (such as labor attorney Harriet Bouslog). The recordings are used by academics throughout the university to support their work in the fields of music, language, anthropology, Hawaiian and Pacific Islands studies, and more. The library, which for decades relied on videotapes and VCRs, recently switched to SnapStream to ensure the integrity and longevity of its media collection.

The Challenge

In the past, student workers at the library selected broadcasts from published TV listings — and did the taping, quality, and pre-cataloging checks manually, which required hours of work and thousands of videotapes. All shows were recorded onto professional-grade Super VHS tapes. Unfortunately, the VCRs began to break down and couldn’t be replaced. The Media Program needed to find a way to record and archive material in a reliable, non-obsolete format. “We can’t buy Super VHS tape quality anymore. The VCR is obsolete,” explains RuthMarie Quirk, manager of operations at Sinclair Library, who sought a digital solution. “We would eventually like to ‘retrofit’ past recordings, too.”

The Solution

After two months of testing, the library in October 2009 deployed a 10-tuner SnapStream appliance with 4 terabytes of storage as its exclusive TV-recording device. That first month, the Media Program recorded 54 hours of Hawaii-related broadcast television and began working with copyright holders to be able to stream the footage. “SnapStream replaced the prior system completely,” Quirk says. “We save money on supplies [video tapes], and we can search for shows just by looking for the term ‘Hawaii.’ It saves hours of student work each week.”

Student workers no longer need to program a bank of VCRs daily, check the tapes, or dub recordings to create user copies. Instead, the librarian in charge sets up recordings on the SnapStream client, reviews recorded shows, and decides what to keep for posterity. The digital media specialist then prepares the shows for streaming. Streaming video is authenticated and can be viewed by anyone at the university — faculty, staff, students — via an Internet connection. “The entire process of setting up recordings and processing recorded shows is much easier and faster with SnapStream,” says Emily Albarillo, the digital media specialist. “Having the shows in a digital format will make them easier to access in the future and also makes viewing much simpler. Storage also takes much less physical space compared to stacks of VHS tapes.”

In addition, the Hawaii Media Program can expand its archive faster than it could before. For example, Albarillo says that, with SnapStream, program staff recently acquired lots of interesting material about the canonization of Father Damien, a Catholic priest who worked in a leprosy colony on the island of Molokai. “We were definitely able to record more than we would have with our VCRs, because there were often multiple shows airing per night, on top of the regular programs we record.” (The university is awaiting copyright approval to add the shows to its collection.)

KHON’s coverage of Hawaii’s Saint Damien

“A Journey of Sacrifice” video remembers the canonized priest who worked on Molokai, Hawaii.