Re: The Art of Storing Tapes

Somehow, I knew that comment was coming. ;-)

My personal opinion... (NOT speaking for the agency or any particular contractor) is that you might want to use that example as a warning to your bosses when they want to recycle tapes to save money. Actually the NASA tapes in question weren't even video, they were telemetry data tapes - that could have been converted to imagery if someone had considered it important enough to fund that effort back in the 1970s.

But I was in pre-school around that time, so I did the best I could with what I knew. ;-) Actually, I have to hand it to the group at Johnson Space Center. The tapes that *were* recovered were from the vaults there. They have the most comprehensive and detailed video archiving system of any NASA Center that I know about, and they still have to fight every year for funding and space.

It could have been much worse. Since they got rid of the film equipment at JSC (about 20 years after broadcast TV stations switched to NTSC videotape for production), there was an effort to get rid of all the "surplus" copies of footage that were on the shelves in the vault at JSC (The argument was that "they were copies" and cutting room floor footage... and that everything with historical value was consistently shipped to the National Archives long ago.) We have an Editor there who fought very hard to find homes for every piece of film that held *any shred* of historical value - even raw footage and a good portion of that also got shipped to cold storage in the National Archives.

Personally, I'm a pack rat. I've archive the final versions of every single show I've done for NASA since I started there. I estimate that's right around 300 videos. That said, I couldn't point you to the Boris RED project file that I used to create the lower 3rd for Neil Armstrong back in the spring of 2000. Well, I know that I saved it to an Exabyte 8mm tape drive and put that tape on my shelf, but the contract for video services changed hands several times since then so I doubt anyone in that department could pull it up - especially since the entire building my edit suite was in was mothballed a few years a due to budget constraints.

Sorry for the rant, but I would like to say that this isn't the fault of any archivist at NASA; in my opinion, it's a result of policies that were implemented to make the most of the budgets that NASA has had since the Apollo program ended... and if they weren't going to spend the money on flying the Saturn V rockets that had already been built, they certainly weren't going to pour any extra money into what they thought were "redundant" data tapes.

Again... just my own personal opinion.