HSRC Acquires New Equipment for Digitization and Preservation

There are two words at the forefront of our minds in the HSRC these days: digitization and preservation. For the past few years, we have been working to digitize materials to share with the global Spirit-empowered movement on the ORU Digital Showcase. It has been a huge success. But there is an even greater and more important issue we are concerned about than showcasing our holdings. The HSRC is in a race against time. 

As an archival collection, much of the audio and video material in the HSRC has reached the half century mark and is at risk. To give you an idea of the scope of the problem, the HSRC and ORU Archives contain over 10,000 reel-to-reel tapes of sermons, conferences, and other recordings that are quickly aging.  We also have several hundred video tapes of ORU events in pre-VHS media types that cannot be watched or converted with our current equipment.  This leaves tens of thousands of hours of materials inaccessible to researchers and keeps these collections at risk. To preserve these materials, we must convert the media in dated formats to digital media. But that process requires having the necessary vintage equipment to do so.

With some expert and generous help from a few friends of the HSRC, we have been able to acquire two machines that will allow us to begin to take on this monumental task of digitizing our older media holdings. The first is a AKAI four track reel-to-reel player that will help us begin to convert our massive trust of reel-to-reel collections including the Edna Jean Horn Radio Collection, sermons from leaders in the Charismatic Renewal and ORU institutional history. The second is a Sony 3/4 U-Matic Video player that will help us convert our treasure of 1970's and 1980's videos related to ORU history.  Now that we have the equipment, I would ask our friends to continue to pray with us that we could have resources needed to work to preserve this material for future generations.