Prior to closing Harpo Studios and relocating offices to Los Angeles, Oprah Winfrey and her team of advisors had the task of preserving the legacy of, unarguably, one of the world’s best-known personalities. After a thorough investigation of suppliers, led by Miss Winfrey’s personal photographer of 27 years, The Digital Archive Group was selected for the project.
For the assignment, TDAG moved our image capture stations, digitization equipment, workstations and a team of 10 image technicians and metadata specialists into a large / secure conference room at Harpo Studios. The initial project was intended to include digitization of 500,000 images from slides, negatives and photographs. As the project went on, it became obvious there was more to be accomplished.
Over the 10-month engagement TDAG accomplished the following tasks
- Digitize and metadata tag over 500,000 images from slides and negatives
- Organize and upload to DAM over 1 million assets from outdated photo CD’s
- Migration of over 2 million digital-born assets into a cloud-based DAM
- Preserve, digitize metadata tag Miss Winfrey’s family photo albums
- Digitize select Oprah magazines, marketing materials, magazine articles and
press clippings
- Digitize photographs from the history of the Harpo Studios building,
previously an old film studio
- Catalog, describe, photograph, box and preserve Miss Winfrey’s legacy wardrobe collection containing over 500 articles of clothing and footwear including Oscar gowns, movie garments and show attire
The final result of this project was the creation of the complete Oprah Winfrey / Harpo Studios Legacy Digital Archive. Any asset within the digital archive can now be easily keyword searched, shared and downloaded with the digital archive.
