The Department of Defense's central repository for imagery, the Defense
Imagery Management Operations Center [DIMOC] recently signed a $5 million
agreement to digitize, store and provide access to hundreds of thousands of
historical images. In addition to its digital archive, the agency has a
massive backlog of images on physical, analog media that ranges from
photographic negatives and slides to films and VHS tapes which are
deteriorating faster than they can offer it to the National Archives. They
also have the problem that their climate-controlled facility in Riverside
California is running out of space. Regardless of condition, images sent to
Riverside are never simply destroyed, because they're federal records.
Everything is assessed, barcoded and stored for later digitization.

Originally, it was determined that it would take 25 years and $50 million to
digitize the current analog holdings with available government resources.
Instead they are taking a different approach that will take only 5 years. In
exchange for digitizing the images, the contractor, T3Media, will be granted
a limited period of exclusivity during which they will be able to charge
non-DOD users a fair-market fee to use the images. This is similar to
agreements that the National Archives has made with genealogical
organizations to digitize some of their holdings.

To read the article go to:
http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=121516

To access a sampling of the holdings go to
http://www.defenseimagery.mil/imagery.html

Thank you to Martin Kaminer for sharing the information.

Jan Meisels Allen
Chairperson, IAJGS Public Records Access Monitoring Committee