2020 In the middle of March, the Covid 19 pandemic began to spread. MTS was very fortunate to have
plenty of work in-house, along with some wonderful new opportunities, which has kept us very busy
throughout this year. Below is a brief of our activities throughout this year. We are very grateful to our
clients and the opportunities we have had to keep our business strong and stable throughout this
challenging period, while having the privilege of working on some wonderful preservation projects.
In the first quarter we finished up the digitization of over 1200 hours of media content for both CLIR/Mellon
Foundation “Recordings At Risk” grant funded projects with the State University at Geneseo and the Squeaky Wheel
Film and Media Art Center within the grant deadlines and within budget. We also finished digitizing 2300
videotapes from the largest bank in the Caribbean Islands well ahead of deadline. We’ve also digitized a rare short
film for preservation, featuring actress Karen Allen (Raiders/Animal House) at the start of her career for “Movies On
A Shoestring” and we have started the restoration on several mix master original ¼” audiotapes featuring the
famous Jazz Singer, Blossom Dearie. The tapes were stored in less than desirable conditions and had fallen off
their cored reels into large clumps of tangled and creased balls of tape. The painstaking process of slowly
untangling the tapes, removing the creases and re-spooling them onto proper NAB hubs, then baking them has
begun. We’re looking forward to the time where we can use our custom Mike Spitz-built ATR-100 deck to digitize
these unique tapes for digital re-mastering and commercial release. At the beginning of March we also began
digitizing a collection of audio and videotapes for a new client, the Scholes Library at Alfred University. The project
is a South Central Regional Library Council grant-funded project. It includes audio cassettes, reel to reel audiotape,
¾” U-Matic and VHS videotapes digitized to both preservation master and access files. In the summer months
along with all our other work, we digitized a one-of-a-kind collection of ¾” U-Matic videotape recordings of Paul
Bley, who was instrumental in the free jazz movement of the 1960’s. We were commissioned by Carol Goss, his
wife, to digitize the videotapes to uncompressed master digital video files so that her production company,
Improvising Arts International, could do post work on the content and re-release the content. In September we
began a new project digitizing a unique collection of audio and video from the Davenport Iowa Public Library. We
worked with them to apply for an Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs Grant, to digitize audiovisual materials from
the Bix Biederbecke Museum. Bix was an internationally known Jazz horn player in the 1920’s and early 1030’s. The
collection includes music recordings of Bix and many unique interviews with other musicians of the time including
Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong, who discussed Bix, the type of person he was and his musical
accomplishments during his short life. The collection includes videotape, cassette and reel-to-reel audiotapes, disk
recordings and motion picture films. Content is being digitized to preservation master files and files for streaming
online. The project will continue through the end of this year.
2019 In late November, projects with a tight turnaround came in from both the Rochester Institute of Technology
and the National Technical Institute for The Deaf. Even with all the work in house, we were able to digitize over 150
hours of content on audio cassette and video formats for these clients, before the end of the year.
In June, we began a 12 month project digitizing 2,300 videotapes in eight different formats from the largest bank in
the Caribbean Islands. The recordings cover 30 years of the bank’s history, on nine different videotape formats.
Tapes document the bank’s growth, advertising commercials and corporate meetings, to training videos and
community sponsored events. Preservation files will be produced for all video formats.
Back in May of 2019, two of the clients we have been working with in 2018 for grant applications received
“Recordings at Risk” grants from the Council of Library and Information Resources, sponsored by the Mellon
Foundation. One is the Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center in Buffalo, NY. Since June, Squeaky Wheel has
been working with Media Transfer Service to digitize a large collection of ¾” U-Matic videotapes comprising the
Axlegrease collection, curated selections of video art and documentary films created by local and national artists
that were broadcast on a weekly basis in Western New York between 1987-1999. The other CLIR grant was
awarded to the State University at Geneseo. Their collection consists of recordings made by Professor and
Ethnomusicologist, James Kimball. In his 40+ year career at SUNY Geneseo, Professor Kimball has documented
master traditional musicians of New York State, specializing in the Eastern square dance tradition. These include
unique interviews and community performances of notable fiddlers, square dance callers, dance musicians and
community members whose knowledge bridges 19th century repertory to contemporary practice of tradition.
Original media formats in this large collection include reel to reel audiotape, cassette audiotape and video. Both
collections combined total over 1200 hours of content and are being digitized for preservation and shared access.
We’re proud to have assisted in helping both these clients receive these grants, of which only 20 in this round were
awarded out of hundreds of applicants across the country.
Beginning 2019, we started with another round of DVD recovery and migration for Niagara County Community
College. We also begin digitizing rare 16mm motion picture films from the archives at Saint John Fisher College. The
films center around the past NBA team - the Rochester Royals, covering games and highlights from the 1950's. We
also began digitizing videotapes from the Thomas Golisano collection at the Wallace Memorial Library at the
Rochester Institute of Technology. Mr. Golisano was founder/CEO of Paychex and a philanthropic billionaire. The
videotapes range in format from D2 to Digibeta and cover news and media events featuring Mr. Golisano outside
of Paychex. We also digitized video, audio, motion picture film and slides from a private collection to be housed at
Cornell University and another private audio collection which included cassette tapes, reel to reel audiotapes and
numerous formats of disk recordings including Gray Audograph disk recordings from the 1940's. Digitizing Gray
Audograph disks require special equipment and software. They play from the center out and vary in pitch from the
start of the recording to the end. Custom turntables allow us to slow the playback speed down to 20RPM - a
middle ground for the speed of these recordings. After transferring the Gray Audograph disks, professional audio
processing software enables us to change the pitch throughout the recording so that the final WAV files result is a
steady pitch throughout. We also digitized more videotapes from the Brockport State University Writers Forum
collection, for preservation and reference.
We’d also like to congratulate both Kirk McDowell and Lindsay Kurano, two second-year students with the Selznick
School at the George Eastman Museum, who interned with us over the past year. Both have accepted positions at
the Library of Congress - Culpeper Facility, where they begin their full-time careers preserving the nation’s
audiovisual heritage.
2018 finds us digitizing more videotapes from the Brockport State University Writers Forum collection, for
preservation and reference. They include early interviews of famous Pulitzer-Prize winning authors. As qualified
vendors for the University of Rochester, a wide variety of various projects have been coming in from different
departments. We've worked on several high-profile cases for local law enforcement agencies and law firms. We
have also migrated two rounds of content from Niagara County Community College. The College has a large
collection of DVD video disks from the Department of Performing Arts library. Because the disks are checked out
by students and teachers, a good portion of the collection has contaminates and scratches on the data side and a
percentage of the disks are also starting to have data layer fading. Our job is to pull the data off the disks as a file
based format for preservation. First, we resurface the disks so the data can be properly read, then we rip the data
off the disks with a special data recovery program. To date we have had a 100% recovery rate. Saint John Fisher
College has us digitizing another round of reel to reel audiotape media from their Rochester Radio History
Collection. These tapes are human interest broadcasts that were produced for public radio, many of which went
national. The tapes suffered from a myriad of issues: flaking, soft binder, sticky shed, decaying tape slices and a
wide variance of azimuth settings between each broadcast - 15-20 broadcasts per reel of tape. We were able to
successfully digitize all of the content without any loss. We also have a major influx of larger consumer collections
coming in including: slide collections, video collections and motion picture film collections. One of the consumer
projects includes digitization of a wonderful collection of 16mm motion picture films covering the construction,
heyday and end of the Rochester subway and trolley system from the 1920's, through 1960's. This content will be
shared with the local library system, local transportation museums and local cable access stations for broadcast.
We’d also like to congratulate both Katherine Pratt and Conner Simon, two second-year students with the Selznick
School at the George Eastman Museum, who interned with us over the past year. Katherine accepted a position at
the National Archives and Connor is producing content for local cable access as well as working with Janice Allen at
Cinema Arts, Inc.
2017 has us finishing up projects for The Dharma Ocean Foundation, The Sisters of Saint Joseph Archives, as well
as a new collection of 3/4" U-Matic tapes from Brockport State University's Writer's Forum. The shows were
produced in the 1960's through 1980's for local cable access. Many famous Pulitzer Prize winning writers and poets
were featured on the show, including names such as W. S Merwin, Richard Wilbur, Isaac Bashevis Singer, John
Ashbery and Anne Sexton as well as other historically significant writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Robert Hayden,
Isaac Asimov and Gene Roddenberry just to name a few. Some of these programs were on tape formats that
required treatment prior to digitizing and/or very special signal processing to stabilize the video signal prior to
digitization. Now these programs can be enjoyed by the general public as well as researchers for years to come.
We also started scanning a second round of several thousand still image assets from the Caesarea collection for
the Universities of Cornell and Cincinnati. St. John Fisher College has sent us another round of reel-to-reel
audiotape digitizing for their Rochester Radio History Collection. Progressive Insurance has also commissioned us
to digitize another round of audiovisual media in their corporate archives collection.
We’d also like to congratulate Brett Scheuermann, our second-year student with the Selznick School at the George
Eastman Museum, who interned with us over the past year. Brett took a position with Sony Memnon. Brett is a key
player for Memnon’s film archiving services based at the Media Digitization & Preservation Initiative at Indiana
University, one of the largest digitizing projects in the country.
2016 Larger projects of note include high-resolution scans of over 8,000 still images including slides, large format
transparencies, large format photos and 35mm roll film negatives. These images document the excavation of the
Promontory Palace, built by King Herod in 25 BC in the ancient city of Caesarea Maritima (located on the shores of
Israel). The dig was co-funded by Cornell University and the University of Cincinnati. As the palace was unearthed
photographs were taken, documenting the excavation and the palace. The palace was then buried again to
preserve it. The scanned photos will serve researchers and scholars for generations to come. Another large project
has us digitizing 1,000 videotapes from the Dharma Ocean Foundation, one of the most well respected Tibetan
Buddhist teaching and meditation foundations in America. Digital derivatives will be used for both educational
streaming now and archival master preservation files for future content preservation. We also digitized another
round of promotional and advertising assets from Progressive Insurance. We've started moving digital information
from over 1,000 aging DVD video disks to file based format for the University of Rochester's Mount Hope Family
Center. We're also digitizing a collection of oral history interviews on cassette audiotape and historical 16mm film
for the Sisters of Saint Joseph archives. We've upgraded our video capabilities adding several legacy videotape
formats to accommodate new client requests. We're also pleased to announce a new partnership with the George
Eastman Museum's Selznick School of Film Preservation - one of the highest regarded schools for film preservation
and archiving in the world. MTS hires masters degree students to help with the growing workload at MTS. The
students work in a real world environment that is related to their degree and MTS gets help from serious young
professionals that are up to speed in many aspects of archiving.
2015 finds us working on more content from Georgetown University, and the estate archives of well-known Jazz
musician - Don Elliott. New projects include digitization of video and audio oral history interviews from the
organization - Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project. Based in Seattle Washington, they are one of the
largest repositories of Japanese American history in the country. Video formats we digitize to archival master file
and reference file are being posted to the web and available here: http://ddr.densho.org/ MTS also took on a
project digitizing the archives of commercial producer Steven Vaughan. Back in the '70's and '80's, Steve was a very
successful commercial producer on contract with companies such as US Air, Channel Fragrances, Giorgio Armani,
Fanta, Nestle, Anheuser Busch, and Chrysler to name a few. His 1" master videotapes had taken on mold
contamination and moderate sticky shed breakdown. After treating the tapes, we transferred them to archival
digital master files and reference files. By September, our new 2,200 square foot facility was operational with
plenty of projects to work on. The second half of 2015 found us continuing with another round of historic
interviews of Japanese Americans interned during WWII from the Densho organization. At the same time we began
a new project digitizing several hundred video and audio tape interviews of Holocaust Survivors from WWII for the
Jewish Federation. Digital derivatives will be used as part of an educational curriculum for city schools as well as
master archival file versions for preservation. We digitized another round of media from the archives of the
corporate offices of Progressive Insurance. We also digitized original music produced for NASA that was played to
astronauts while on missions during the 80's like Skylab. This music was also inserted into landers and probes as
part of a time capsule representation.
2014 continued our success. The Walter Williams PBS documentary finally finished in February. Overall - a very nice
piece to go to broadcast in the spring of 2015. Continuing projects for the Memorial Art Gallery, St. John Fisher
College, Georgetown University and Progressive Insurance kept a steady flow of new audiovisual materials coming
in. New projects included the first round of digitizing unique video and audiotape masters from the estate of well
known Jazz Musician; Don Elliott. With the help of his friend, Les Paul, Don built one of the first multi-track
recording studios in the country. Content from his estate includes live public concerts and private jam sessions in
his studios, which include friends such as jazz greats: Bill Evans, Gerry Mulligan, Phil Bodner and Big Joe Williams.
2013 was our busiest year yet. Projects for the PBS documentary on Walter Williams, Memorial Art Gallery, St John
Fisher College, University of Rochester mentioned below were ongoing. Highlights of new projects includes:
digitization of both video and audio assets from the Jean Craighead George estate (famous children book author),
as well as 16mm motion picture film from the 1930's and 1940's for Camp Pathfinder - the famous canoe camp
based in Algonquin Provincial Park. We also began a multi-year project with the Department of Neurology at the
University of Georgetown, digitizing their holdings of over 1800 hours of very valuable videotaped lab studies on
brain plasticity. MTS was commissioned to digitize Georgetown's collection that spans 40 years on over 10 different
legacy videotape formats for both laboratory coding and long-term preservation. We also began a long term
project with Progressive Insurance to digitize all of their archival audiovisual media assets for reference, re-use in
future advertising campaigns and preservation. Finally we digitized camera original 16mm film taken by famed
ornithologist Gladys Gordon Fry, documenting her trip as one of the first woman to explore Trinidad and Tobago
as an ornithologist back in the 1930's. Gladys worked for the Museum of Natural History in New York City and was
know as the "Bird Lady of Central Park" for her unique bird watching tours through Central Park.
What’s New at MTS
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