Safeguarding Lab History One Video, Photo, and Article at a Time

Jane Koropsak and Timothy Green organize thousands of archival records

August 27, 2024

In December 2019, after a rewarding 30 years at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory — including 22 in the Lab’s Media and Communications Office — Jane Koropsak retired.

Then, she came back two months later.

David Manning, director of the Stakeholders Relations Office, asked her to help work on an important project: sorting through an estimated 8,000 historical videos.

Make no mistake — Koropsak was the perfect person to call. “I really was looking forward to doing all of this,” she said. “I love the Lab’s history. I think we work in an extremely historical, valuable, interesting place.”

Manning noted that “having worked in the Media and Communications role for so many years, Jane possessed the unique ability of understanding the content and context of the archive.” He added that her work on this project made new initiatives possible: “Her extensive knowledge of the Lab’s history and people enabled us to prioritize our efforts once the digitization technology was sufficiently advanced and funding became available. As a result, we were able to preserve this critical Laboratory history and make it accessible for decades to come.”

Koropsak parsed through hundreds of boxes, watching the videos and deciding whether to keep them, put them on hard drives, archive them, or discard them. Documented in a Lab-produced segment from 2021, Koropsak’s work was part of a larger collaboration with Cultural Resource Manager Timothy Green, the Media and Communications Office, and Creative Resources to make the Lab’s historic resources, documents, videos, photos, and press releases available for future queries.

Working part time, Koropsak spent about two years organizing the videos. “There were videos going back all the way to the 1950s on all kinds of media,” she said, including Betamax tape, reel-to-reel, DVD, CD, and audio cassettes.

The main motivation for making determinations about what to digitize is that the magnetic basis of these media will eventually degrade, Green explained.

Roger Stoutenburgh and Joseph Rubino, now-retired photographers who worked at the Lab for many decades, helped, too. Timothy Kuhn, a former Lab systems analyst and videographer who has also left Brookhaven, contributed by acquiring and troubleshooting old-time machines needed to watch the aging footage.

“Jane had the responsibility of looking at every last one of these things,” Green recalled with a chuckle.

It took some detective work. “If it wasn't clear what was written on the tape, that meant popping it into a player, watching a little bit, and trying to figure out what it's all about,” said Green. If Koropsak had doubts, she would call Green for a second opinion.

They decided to keep materials related to high-level science as well as all Brookhaven Lectures and anything involving past Lab directors. They did not preserve outdated safety trainings or certain Brookhaven Employees' Recreation Association (BERA) videos, since many BERA activities were also captured and retained in the photo archive.

A portal back in time at our fingertips

While Koropsak’s task was certainly laborious and detail-oriented, it came with fun moments. She recalled uncovering videoclips portraying major turning points as well as everyday life at the Lab. For example, she located footage from a 1950s holiday party as well as the countdown to enacting beam acceleration at the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron in the early 1960s. From more recent years, she found a video of the groundbreaking ceremony at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials, a DOE Office of Science user facility at Brookhaven, in 2005.

The videos designated for preservation were sent off site to a company that specializes in digitizing old video. In the end, Koropsak condensed the video storage volume by almost half. The digitized content is now easily accessible. Items in a physical format, such as hard drives, can be located through a custom-built archival database constructed with assistance from Kuhn.

“If somebody was coming in to do research on the Laboratory, we could send them a copy of the database, and it’s easily transmittable,” Green said. “Then, they could come back and say, ‘I'd like to get video number 1,308,’ and we would be able to go back and find it.”

“I have thoroughly enjoyed every minute of this project,” Koropsak reflected. “I think it's important to remember where we started and how we got to where we are.”

Beyond the videos

After finishing the video project, Koropsak stayed on to start tackling additional archival treasure troves of Laboratory history: hundreds of thousands of photo negatives dating back to the Lab’s very beginning in 1947. Koropsak worked with Lab photographers to identify which photos they should scan. Then, she tagged each photo with appropriate keywords, both in an online photo storage platform and in printed copies of The Bulletin, the Lab’s newspaper, which ran for 65 years before ceasing operation in 2012.

“The Bulletin highlighted every event, every scientific accomplishment, plus employee accomplishments and sports, BERA activities — all of it,” Koropsak emphasized. She eliminated duplicate copies from a bank of file cabinets and condensed the contents into a more organized format.

She also transferred copies of Brookhaven Lab press releases dating back to 1946 — before the Laboratory even opened — and up to 2003, when the online versions became the official copy of record, into sturdier storage cases.

In addition to helping Koropsak wrangle the Media and Communications Office’s assets, Green currently oversees a collection of about 3,000 artifacts from the Brookhaven Lab site’s time as Camp Upton, an Army induction and training center during the World Wars. Some of these objects are displayed in Berkner Hall, while others are on display in the lobby of building 400. The rest are in permanent storage, with additional items being donated on occasion.

Back to the future

Wearing many hats at the Lab, Green can only dedicate a quarter of his time to cultural resource work. But he was excited to share that, when he retires later this year (and Koropsak retires again!), his replacement hire will do so full time. One item on that employee’s to-do list will be comparing the entire Camp Upton collection to the catalog and ensuring everything is accounted for.

The new cultural resource employee will take the torch for Koropsak’s archive work, too. That means continuing to review countless photo negatives — Brookhaven only went fully digital in the mid 1990s — and rescanning some copies of The Bulletin, which is available online but not in high resolution due to scanner limitations at the time the original scans were made.

Together, Koropsak and Green make a compelling case for the crucial role of history-keeping at a scientific institution like Brookhaven. “The early days of the Laboratory tell the full story,” Koropsak noted. “The scientist pioneers of that time deserve to be recognized as the people who started out here and brought us to where we are now.”

Nodding his head in agreement, Green concluded, “If we can save an archive and make it available for scientific historians, then somebody will be able to tell the story down the road.”

Brookhaven National Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit science.energy.gov.

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