NEWS: OUR LATEST DIGITISATION PROJECT UNCOVERING FASCINATING HIDDEN ARCHIVAL GEMS

We are currently embarking on a huge digitisation project, uncovering fascinating hidden footage from around the world, which has been stored away in varying conditions in different locations.
As a result, we are able to excavate these untold stories and unseen rushes from significant events over the past few decades, digitise and make available online.  
 
Helen Walker has been overseeing the project, and shares her thoughts on the project to date.  
 
What has inspired this project and what’s the purpose? 
  
Soon after our relationship with Reuters was first forged in 2017, we embarked on a project to digitise their Johannesburg Bureau archive, which had previously been sat in a garage unloved and forgotten about. This venture uncovered some amazing unseen footage. When we fully joined the Reuters family last year, it was really exciting to gain unfettered access to the undigtized tape archives of their news bureaus all over the world. While Reuters is known worldwide as the top agency for breaking news, with this project we hope to bring their first-class archival content to the fore also.  
 
The project also takes archival preservation into consideration: as tape degrades over time and so we risk losing this precious content if it is not digitised, plus some of these tapes are the only format we hold the asset, so if there was to be a disaster (natural or otherwise), we are in danger of losing content - which given the current situation in the Middle East, is a real danger for the Jerusalem bureau.  
  
How many tapes are there in total to digitize?
  
We have been working with bureaus in Singapore, Sarajevo, Berlin, New York, Tokyo, Cairo, Jerusalem, Hong Kong, Santiago, Washington DC, Iraq, Seoul, Belgrade, Athens and Madrid and together that comes to at least 7500 tapes we are digitizing - although we uncover more material all the time! 
  
When you visit the bureaus, what tasks do you do? 
  
So far, we have gone on-site in New York, Berlin and LA, as well as visiting the storage facilities in the UK where the Singapore and Sarajevo content were shipped. 
  
The first thing to take into account is the physicality of the tapes - what formats are in the archive? What condition are they in? Some haven’t been stored in ideal conditions over the years so there is the risk of mould and other deterioration. 
  
Next we look for any useful metadata written on the tape case or labelled on the tape itself which might give us information on when and where the content was filmed - but often busy journalists didn’t label tapes with future archivists in mind!  
  
Once we’ve sifted for archival gold - such as unseen rushes - we get the tapes safely packed up ready to be sent to the nearest Iron Mountain digitisation facility.   
  
How has Iron Mountain helped? 
  
Iron Mountain has provided a one-stop-shop for this project! It was evident from the outset that there was no other organisation that would be able to accommodate a huge project that was to be delivered in such a tight timeframe.  
  
We also needed several solutions provided to us: not only was there the actual digitisation aspect but there was also a lot of shipping and logistics work to undertake.  
  
Finally Iron Mountain were able to provide us with solutions for the lack of metadata available for these tapes, by imaging assets so that we can ingest them into our database using picture to text AI readers in order to populate our metadata fields.  
  
How far are you with the project to date? 
  
We have about a third of the bureau archives digitised, which means there are still about 5000 tapes to go! Most of these remaining bureaus are being shipped directly to the nearest Iron Mountain digitisation facilities in London, New Jersey, Los Angeles and Paris in order to get digitisation underway as soon as possible.  
  
Have you experienced any delays, or problems encountered? 
  
Most of the delays have been logistics related - unsurprisingly getting tapes out of less stable areas such as Baghdad and Jerusalem has presented a few hold-ups! The Iron Mountain shipping and logistics experts have been amazing in finding solutions.  
  
What has been the most unusual item/tape you have uncovered? 
  
When I got stuck into the Sarajevo archive, on opening a can of what looked to be 16mm film I was surprised to find a carton of 30 year old Serbian cigarettes. For the journalists on the ground during the Bosnian war, these would have been a useful sweetener for getting information from ‘fixers’ or getting past police and military checkpoints! 

  
What has been the best find you have discovered? 
  
The history some Reuters video journalists have borne witness to is quite astounding. For instance, we have a lot of footage of exhumations of mass graves during the Bosnian war, when UN officials were gathering evidence of war crimes. I was also amazed to find footage of when Princess Diana travelled to Bosnia as part of her landmine campaign work and when U2 became the first artists to hold a concert in Sarajevo after the Bosnian war ended.  
  
How old is the footage on the tapes? 
  
Some of these collections date back to the first betacams and Beta SPs of the 1980s, and the archive ends in the late 00s when Reuters journalists rolled out their digitisation programme and retired cameras which recorded onto tape.  
  
When will the tapes go on Reuters database and how can people gain access? 
  
Keep your eyes peeled on reuters.screenocean.com where all this new content will be searchable and downloadable, as well as newsletters where we will be curating the best content for you to peruse!