We've answered "The Archive Question"

Will Sullivan, author of the fabulous blog Journerdism, asked this question on the yahoo group:

How do you / your paper archive the video you shot?

I know DV tapes, in themselves, act as an archive and a lot of TV stations use that method with their tapes. But we'd prefer something digital that we can access/search/manage more quickly.

I thought I had already written about our (perhaps temporary) archive solution but I searched my blog archive and can't find it. I guess I dreamed it! Anyway, here it is:

The photo department uses Jobminder for assignments. When we shoot a tape, we go into Jobminder and create an entry for our assignment. That gives us a Jobminder number, which goes on the tape label. Jobminder is a completely searchable archive of assignments.

We use NICA for our photo, story and page archiving. For our videos, we create a frame grab and enter in all the File info that we would for any other photo. We include "Multimedia" and the Jobminder number in the caption section. Those frame grabs get archived in NICA, which is searchable by the entire newsroom. We also get a NICA number assigned to the tape. The NICA entry points people to the jobminder number so they can find the tape.

We create an envelope labeled with the Jobminder number, NICA number, shoot date, photographer's name, and a brief description of the tape contents. The envelope gets filed by the Jobminder number.

Here's the contents of the envelope:

• Tape


• Printed jobminder assignment sheet


• CD with highest quality Quicktime file of finished product, WMV file of the Web version, and the FCP file which includes all the log/capture information (that makes it easy to re-capture footage at any time)

So far it seems to be working very well. Eventually we may move to a digital archival system, but that will take a lot of planning and a whole bunch of storage space. I think this system will do very well in the meantime.