On a recent Tuesday morning, a giant truck with 300 boxes of MSIA archival media arrived at our Santa Monica 2101 Wilshire building. With masks in place, Mark Lurie, John Pavilonis, and a friendly delivery guy got a good workout unloading all of the backup tapes –DATs, CD’s, D2’s, Betacams, and others — J-R and John Morton recordings that were once stored up in Felton, California (just north of Santa Cruz and Monterey).

When the Felton storage facility closed and relocated to Los Angeles, it defeated our plan to keep the archives in separate locations, in case the big one rocked Los Angeles. Move to plan B? No. We needed a new Plan A.

Setting up our staging area for inventory, repackaging for long-term deep storage

Under the new plan, we are gathering the media to do a thorough inventory and once we have ensured that we have all the copies we need, it will be packed and shipped off-site; this time to a salt mine storage facility in Kentucky. We found that the major movie studios, as well as the National Archives, hold hundreds of miles of film, tape and paper records in these underground mines – 58 stories underground – with controlled temperature and humidity.

A week later, we did a reconnaissance mission at the Hollywood Vaults location in Los Angeles, a state of the art media storage facility where the MSIA masters and second archival copies are kept. We culled the media further to consolidate what will be kept in location A (Hollywood Vaults) and location B (Salt mine in Kentucky). We believe it is important to still retain the original masters and archive copies stored in physical format, to serve as backups even though we are converting all recordings to digital format. And who knows, maybe someday we will have amazing technology that will allow us to extract better versions from original masters.

Mark Lurie at work in the vault, it’s freezing in there!

 

Concurrently, the digitizing project continues to be underway. Digital archiving is currently the most efficient method for preservation. We are making both digital masters as well as digital ‘working’ copies available on cloud storage that can be easily accessed and duplicated into computer hard drives for editing, publishing, ​and ultimately make the teachings more easily available to you and all!

In loving,