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SMPL makes a new home in Redwood City

Obsolete tape cleaning equipment packed for the move

The Stanford Media Preservation Lab (SMPL) is making good progress in setting up shop at our new location in Redwood City. 

SMPL moved from Page Mill Road in Palo Alto -- along with HighWire Press, Stanford University Press, LOCKSS, and parts of both Preservation and Special Collections -- to 425 Broadway over Labor Day weekend. (Shortly thereafter Stanford announced plans to redevelop the Redwood City site and create a major auxiliary campus.)  We're very excited about the new space!  It provides us with several opportunities to streamline and improve our facilities, workflows and services. More about that in a future post. For now, here are some photos illustrating our progress. 

SMPL production team (L-R) Nathan Coy, Geoff Willard, and Michael Angeletti roll in the reel players

SMPL's audio, video, and film equipment survived the relocation without damage or incident. Pictured above is the team -- (L-R) Nathan Coy, Geoff Willard, and Michael Angeletti -- rolling in three of our audio reel players.

Now that miscellaneous construction and delivery delays are behind us, we can get to work on installing our media treatment equipment, playback gear, and digitization systems in earnest.

There are 1.65 miles of audio, video and data cable to be installed at the new labs.

We will use a total of 1.65 miles of audio, video, and data cable to connect our equipment in three production systems. 

New racks for the video lab were empty at the beginning of the week.

We started to install the video lab last week. Last Monday, the video racks stood empty.

 

Lab racks are filling up with video equipment after first week of installation.

By the end of the week, about half of the video equipment was racked and cabled. We are cutting and fashioning cables as we go, labeling and routing them carefully in order to keep everything neat and easy to manage. It is time-consuming, but critical.

This week we'll see more progress on the video installation, and start in on the audio lab!  We'll report back soon with more news on our progress.