The Monroe County Public Library’s Community Access Television Services is in the process of digitizing about 30,000 media recordings on tape which date back to the 1970s. The goal is to have them digitized by 2030, CATS manager Martin O’Neill said.
The CATS department was established in 1973 to provide Monroe County residents with television coverage of city and county government meetings, as well as public events.
Despite the archived tapes not being well-documented, O’Neill said there are likely recordings of interviews and lectures from people such as Gloria Steinem and the Dalai Lama visiting Bloomington.
He said the collection has high school plays from the 1970s and 1980s and local programs like Kids Alive, which was the longest running kids program in the county. O’Neill said a recorded school board meeting that may seem insignificant now could serve the community in the future.
“That's one of the things about history, the smallest things, we don't think it's going to be important, but somewhere down the line, somebody will think it's important,” he said.
The archivists started to digitize the records in 2023. However, they found out quickly their machines would break down after running a couple hundred tapes and a thousand records a year would take about 30 years, he said. They started working with Memnon Archiving Services in Bloomington in 2026 to help them digitize the records.
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“One thousand tapes goes on one little four terabyte hard drive, and then we take it back and we clean everything up, check the audio, make sure the audio is level(ed), and then we put it on our servers here,” O’Neill said.
So far CATS has about 3,000 tapes digitized. The goal is to have the digitized records available on their website.
The four-year project will cost over $100,000. O’Neill said they have been able to build up a reserve from the cable franchise fees they are funded by to help cover the cost. They are also receiving funding from the city to help cover their portion of the project.
He said the digitization process is not as simple as just running a tape through a machine. Some tapes need to be cleaned beforehand because the oxides from the tapes separate over time. Some tapes may also need to be baked in a low temperature oven, cooled, and then cleaned of their oxides.
“Not all tapes need to be treated like that, but a lot do, and every once in a while there'll just be a failure rate,” he said. “There is a failure rate right now for us. It's actually pretty small, out of I think 1000 tapes we've had two failures, which is pretty good.”
The recordings are on a variety of film formats such as VHS, Beta Cam, three-quarter inch, DVDs and more.
After the recordings have been digitized, O’Neill said they are thinking about partnering with Memnon to dispose of them properly or talk to art groups about ways to recycle them for art.
