The Preliminary Program

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You can download a full copy of the Conference Program here.
Poster presentations can be found here.

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TUESDAY . October 7

8:00am – 5:30pm | Pre-registration required
Workshop: Small Gauge Projection and the Art of Projector Maintenance and Repair

Chair and Speakers
Taylor McBride, Smithsonian Institution
Dino Everett, USC SCA Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive
Skip Elsheimer, A/V Geeks
Ben Moskowitz, New York University
Siobhan C. Hagan, University of Baltimore Langsdale Library
Liz Coffey, Harvard Film Archive

The Small Gauge Amateur Film Committee hosts a full-day pre-conference workshop on small gauge film projection and projector maintenance and repair. The workshop will cover 16mm, 8mm, and Super 8 film projection and projector repair and maintenance protocol for 16mm, 8mm, and Super 8 projectors (at least one model of each), as well as how to repair VHS players and tapes. Attendees will have the chance to work hands-on with the playback machinery and will leave with the knowledge of how to safely project small-gauge archival film as well as how to care for the projectors needed to view them. This workshop is made possible through the generous sponsorship of Boston Light & Sound and A/V Geeks LLC.

8:30am – 5:30pm | Scarborough 1 | Pre-registration required
Workshop: AMIA Cataloging and Metadata Committee Workshop [Day I]

Chair and Speakers
Thelma Ross, Academy Film Archive
Randal Luckow, HBO
Andrea Leigh, Library of Congress – Packard Campus
Rebecca Guenther, Library of Congress/NYU MIAP Program
Linda Tadic, Audiovisual Archive Network
Meredith Reese, HBO
Meghan Fitzgerald, HBO

The bi-annually held cataloging and metadata workshop is sponsored by the AMIA Cataloging and Metadata Committee. This modified 2014 version contains new content and offers attendees—past and future alike—a workshop that emphasizes practical implementation of a variety of tools, including tools currently in development. It incorporates more hands-on exercises than ever before and addresses how the attendee can concretely integrate new models for description into their current workflows and environments. The two-day program moves the attendee from concept to implementation starting with cataloging principles and metadata concepts that form the basis for describing and providing access to moving images in an evolving media and media technology environment. The workshop includes information about the role of cataloging for analog and digital asset management; the value, purpose and application of metadata and cataloging standards; management of resources through their life cycles; descriptive, structural, and administrative metadata (including rights and preservation metadata); and, data models and data mapping. Dynamic presentations encompass film, video, digital, and broadcast materials and include interactive exercises to put cataloging and metadata concepts directly into practice. Laptop computer required – no laptops will be provided.

WEDNESDAY . October 8

8:00am – 12:00pm | Pre-registration required
Workshop: Audiovisual & Preservation Technology Basics for Non-Engineers

Speaker
James Snyder, Library of Congress

The workshop will focus on providing a good technical basis, in plain English, for those who do not already have audiovisual engineering training. The goal is to allow non-technical people of all types to have a good, basic grasp of the technologies, concepts and terms involved in audiovisual recording and reproduction in general, digitization of audiovisual materials, and what is involved in file-based workflows, metadata and long-term data archiving once materials are digitized. People who attend the workshop will walk away with a good, operating grasp of the technologies involved, de-mystifying the terms and concepts audiovisual archivists face every day at institutions large and small to know what materials they are looking at, how to handle their preservation, how to plan for their digital conversion, and have a functional knowledge of the terminology and concepts required to write grants and contracts for digital conversion and storage of audiovisual materials.

8:30am – 5:30pm | Pre-registration required
Workshop: From Theory to Action: A Pragmatic Approach to Digital Preservation

Chair and Speakers
Jaime L Schumacher, University Libraries – Northern Illinois University
Jeff Hancks, Western Illinois University Libraries
Patrice-Andre Prud’homme, Illinois State University
Aaisha Haykal, Chicago State University Archives and Special Collections

The Digital POWRR grant, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has been investigating scalable and sustainable digital preservation solutions to recommend for small- and medium-sized libraries with restricted resources. A number of grant partners will share their expertise with a one-day workshop, offering a theoretical and practical lens with hands-on experience with initial pre-ingest steps to accessioning digital content. Prior to attending the workshop, minimal background knowledge in digital preservation and curation and responsibilities for digital assets in participants’ organization is expected. The DPOE program offers valuable resources to prepare for this workshop. Participants will leave with an understanding of different tools and services and how they may fit within their organization. While participants will take away resources that help them align communication and advocacy, policymaking, and tool selection and implementation, they will also engage in a 3-3-3 Action Plan towards meeting their digital preservation goals. Laptop computer required – no laptops will be provided.

8:30am – 5:30pm | Pre-registration required
Workshop: AMIA Cataloging and Metadata Committee Workshop [Day II]

8:30am – 5:30pm | Pre-registration required
AMIA/DLF Hack Day

Chairs
Kara Van Malssen, AVPreserve
Steven Villereal, University of Virginia
Lauren Sorensen, Library of Congress

AMIA/DLF Hack Day is a unique opportunity for practitioners and managers of audiovisual collections to join with developers and engineers for an intense day of collaboration to develop solutions for audiovisual preservation and access. Within digital preservation and curation communities, hack days provide an opportunity for archivists, collection managers, technologists, and others to work together to develop software solutions, documentation or training materials, and more for digital collections management needs. We are also hosting a concurrent Wikipedia edit-a-thon, which will focus on topics related to digital preservation & access for audiovisual materials. While we encourage non-engineers to participate in the hack day portion, there’s a lot of work to be done to describe topics relevant to our community on Wikipedia as well.

10:00am – 5:00pm | Pre-registration required
Workshop: Community Archiving

Chair and Speakers
Amy Sloper, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research Archvies
Moriah Ulinskas, Bay Area Video Coalition
Sandra Yates, McGovern Historical Center| The TMC Library
Yvonne Ng, WITNESS
Mona Jimenez, Moving Image Archiving & Preservation, NYU
Rachel Beattie, Media Commons – Robarts Library, University of Toronto

Community Archiving provides moving image archivists the opportunity to serve the community of Savannah and work with local volunteers to help an organization gain intellectual and physical control over an endangered moving image collection. This year we are partnering with All Walks of Life (AWOL), a non-profit organization that provides arts and technology education for at-risk youth in Savannah. Conference attendees will be paired with teens who have been working with AWOL for the past few years as well as archivists from the Savannah community to conduct basic processing, cataloging and inspection of a collection of videos produced by AWOL.

12:30pm – 5:30pm | Lucas Theatre | Pre-registration required
The Reel Thing XXXIV

Chairs
Grover Crisp, Sony Pictures
Michael Friend, Sony Pictures

Presenting the latest technologies in audiovisual restoration and preservation. The Reel Thing brings together a unique line up of laboratory technicians, archivists, new media technologists and preservationists. Curated by Grover Crisp and Michael Friend.

1:00pm – 5:00pm | Pre-registration required
Workshop: Preserving Your Audio and Video Assets: The Essentials

Chair and Speakers
Peter Brothers, SPECS BROS., LLC
John Walko, Scene Savers

What do you need to know to protect the video and audio materials in your collection? If you want to preserve these valuable assets, you really need a basic understanding of the media…what is unique about it, how it should be handled, how to evaluate its condition, and what concepts and decisions need to be applied to preserve the content for future generations. This workshop will start with an overview of tape structure, proper handling/storage procedures, obsolescence considerations and evaluation techniques needed to assess and protect what you have in your collections. This will include pictorial guides to identifying tape types, rate danger from obsolescence and standardized procedures to evaluate if tapes are safe to play or copy. The workshop will then review popular digital file options, digital storage options, essentials for choosing and dealing with digitization or storage vendors, how to determine when digitization or storage can be done in-house and, finally, options for metadata and content retrieval.

5:45pm – 6:30pm | Pre-registration required
Newcomer’s Mixer

Welcome to the AMIA Conference! The Newcomer program pairs first-time attendees with experienced AMIA members. Support and guidance is offered to those who may be attending an AMIA conference for the first time and provides experienced AMIA members an opportunity to meet newcomers to the field or to the conference.

6:30pm – 7:30pm
Opening Cocktails: Welcome to Savannah!

It’s opening night in Savannah! A chance to say hello to friends, meet new colleagues, and get ready for the days ahead.

8:00pm – 10:00pm
AMIA Trivia Throwdown

Trivia Master
Colleen Simpson, Prasad Corporation

Test your skills, win prizes and see if you can be the team that unseats the current AMIA Trivia
Champions. Put your name on that monkey trophy! Everyone is welcome – sign up as a team or as an individual table.

THURSDAY . October 9

8:00am – 8:30am
AMIA Conference Welcome
2014 Silver Light Award and Scholars Presentation

Please join us for a continental breakfast and the official Conference welcome and to recognize the 2014 Silver Light Award honoree as well as this year’s Scholarship and Internship recipients.

8:30am – 9:15am
AMIA 2014 Keynote Speaker

9:15am – 6:30pm
AMIA Vendor Café

Don’t miss an opportunity to visit the vendor exhibits! The vendor exhibits are a great way to learn what is new, what is working and what is on the horizon. Whether or not you are a buyer, the Café is an opportunity to meet colleagues who provide the products and services we all rely on.

9:30am – 10:30am
OSDPA: Open Source Tools, Technologies and Considerations

Speakers
Trevor Thornton, North Carolina State University
Lauren Sorensen, Library of Congress

Software has become an integral component of digital preservation practice. Based on preservation principles as well as budgetary considerations, open source software has been embraced by the archival community. However, there is still a lack of clarity regarding the process and component parts that make up open source software projects. Trevor Thornton will present an introduction to open source development, with particular focus on developing web applications. He’ll discuss some fundamental open source concepts, provide an overview of technologies utilized in web application development, and offer important considerations for implementers at all levels. Lauren Sorensen will speak about Git and Github, providing an overview of its usefulness to developers, archives and other communities. She will focus on examining uses for Github and version control in an AV archives context, walk through Git and Github signup, review a script to demonstrate Github’s utilities, and relate these topics back to Thornton’s talk.

9:30am – 10:30am
Return to the Fold: Reuniting Filmmaker Manuscripts with Their Films

Chair and Speakers
Nancy Kauffman, George Eastman House
Jared Case, George Eastman House
Ken Fox, George Eastman House
Stacey Doyle, George Eastman House

How do film archives handle manuscript collections? In 2013 George Eastman House received a grant from a previously untapped funding source – the Council on Libraries and Information Resources – to answer just this question. The Moving Image Department launched a pilot project designed to process the manuscripts of four unique independent filmmakers and fully incorporate the resulting finding aids into the museum’s larger cataloging system. The aim is a more holistic approach to collection management and representation of materials in multiple formats, which will improve discoverability and thereby better serve the researcher. This session will address the importance of manuscripts in a film archive and the challenges faced when integrating archival description into a museum cataloging system. The panelists will also talk about the four filmmakers, the content of their collections, and the processing procedures they employed.

11:00am – 12:00pm
Hidden Cinema: Moving Image and Sound from Medical Research Institutions

Chair and Speakers
Angela Saward, Wellcome Library/Wellcome Trust (UK)
Timothy Wisniewski, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives/John Hopkins Medical Institutions (US)

In the Wellcome Library, the earliest material is a wax cylinder recording of Florence Nightingale’s voice (1890) and the collection’s particular strength is in twentieth century medical humanities (aka history of medicine). The Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives is the official repository of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, and maintains an extensive collection of medical audiovisual materials produced by this institution, with a particular strength in films of pioneering mid-century developments in cardiac surgery and cardiology. The presentation will endeavor to show what it means to be a department ‘nested’ within a bigger organization which has specific challenge areas, looking at collection development strategically and addressing ‘communicating the archive’- marketing the resource internally, and experiences of leveraging funding. Some of the complexities in handling the legal aspects of material featuring people in the health system (especially patients) will be shared. Some material from the collections will be screened as part of the session

11:00am – 12:00pm
OSDPA: One Body, Many Heads: Preservation and Access From Project Hydra

Speakers
Karen Cariani, WGBH
Jon Dunn, Indiana University Library
Stefan Elnabli, Northwestern University Library
Hannah Frost, Stanford University Libraries

Open source solutions to our challenges in audiovisual preservation and access not only include tools and software applications, but technological frameworks that constitute a foundation for innovation. One such framework is Project Hydra – an exciting collaboration of archivists, media-managers, and software developers who are building and using this community-sourced application framework to create new and open systems that manage, preserve, and provide access to digital audiovisual content. This panel will showcase Hydra-influenced open source projects and strategic planning from WGBH, Indiana University Library, Northwestern University Library, and Stanford University Library. From unique audiovisual preservation systems to cataloguing and access management solutions, representatives will discuss their projects, how their work meets the growing demands of audiovisual preservation and access, and their experiences in developing for the open source community.

11:00am – 12:00pm
How Safe is Your Data – Examining Data Loss in an Archival Environment

Chair and Speakers
John Walko, Scene Savers
Barry Lunt, PhD, Brigham Young University

After you have digitized content from your collection, how do you know it is safe? As archivists, we’re taught to have three copies on three different type of media. But why does the media fail in the first place? Join us to gain an understanding of how data is stored, read back, and how data errors are detected and corrected. We’ll report on what causes drive failures and what you can do to ensure your data is safe.

12:00pm – 2:00pm | Vendor Café
Poster Session: Thursday Presentations

Party Out of Bounds: Friendraising and Outreach in Special Collections
Mary Miller, Walter J. Brown Media Archives

From Videola® to BlackMagicPro: Digitization Solutions at Underfunded Archives
Jorge Avila, Fundación Patrimonio Filmico Colombiano
Juana Suárez (Translator), NYU

How to be an Archival Rock Star
Hannah Palin, University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections

Avalon Media System
Stefan Elnabli, Northwestern University Library

Research on Energy Saving Opportunities in Libraries and Archives
Christopher Cameron, Image Permanence Institute

The Race to Save the History of Hollywood Park
Staci Hogsett, UCLA Moving Image Archive Studies
Alina Sinetos, UCLA Moving Image Archive Studies

The Lost Works of Fred Engelberg at The USC Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive
Malin Kan, UCLA MIAS

Out of Experimental Television: Audiovisual Preservation at Cornell
Tre Berney, Cornell University

A Century of Sound: The Sound of Movies 1933-1975
Robert Heiber, The Rick Chace Foundation

12:00pm – 1:00pm | Sloane
Meeting: Open Source Committee

12:00pm – 1:00pm | Percival
Meeting: Conference Committee

12:00pm – 1:00pm | Verelist
Meeting: Small Gauge/Amateur Film Committee

1:00pm – 2:00pm | Sloane
Meeting: Publications Committee

1:00pm – 2:00pm | Percival
Meeting: Moving Image Related Materials & Documentation (MIRMD) Committee

1:00pm – 2:00pm | Verelist
Meeting: Copyright Committee

2:00pm – 3:00pm
OSDPA: The First Digital Preservation Repository for Museum Collections: An Open Source Approach

Speakers
Ben Fino-Radin, The Museum of Modern Art
Kara Van Malssen, AVPreserve
Dan Gillean, Artefactual Systems

For three years, the Museum of Modern Art has worked to build the first digital repository designed to meet the needs and requirements of museum collections. This new system aims to facilitate digital collections care, management, and preservation for time-based media and born-digital artworks. Long-term viability and sustainability have been at the core of the design from the outset, extending to every aspect of the project – from the interdepartmental and interdisciplinary team of advisors at MoMA that steered the project, to the fundamental involvement of outside field experts, and the decision to leverage and adapt existing, open-source software. This presentation will offer a public demonstration of this new repository system, a discussion of the development process, and insights into decisions made during its design and implementation. Emphasis will be placed on the practical aspects of project management and the process of building such a system upon open-source frameworks.

2:00pm – 3:00pm
Preserving Eyes on the Prize

Chair and Speakers
Nadia Ghasedi, Washington University
Irene Taylor, Washington University
Laura Major, Colorlab

Regarded as the definitive work on the Civil Rights Movement, the documentary series, Eyes on the Prize, has been seen by millions since its PBS debut in 1987. However, what remains unseen are the 75 hours of interview outtakes that provide further insight into the series’ original stories of struggle, resistance, and perseverance. Learn more about Washington University Film & Media Archive’s efforts to preserve and make accessible this invaluable primary source content for scholars, teachers, students, and filmmakers alike through its Eyes on the Prize Preservation Project. Now in its fourth and final year, this Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded project is preserving the first six hours of the series and all associated interview outtakes. This session will explore approaches to managing large-scale preservation projects, including the use of ancillary collection materials to inform the planning process, technical challenges, workflow management, metadata creation, lab communication, and future digitization and reassembly.

2:00pm – 2:30pm
Play It Again: Creating a Playable History of Australasian Digital Games

Speaker
Nick Richardson, Australian Centre for the Moving Image

The ‘Play It Again’ project is a collaboration between cultural and academic institutions to preserve the largely unknown histories of 1980s game development in Australia and New Zealand, ensuring that local titles are documented, collected, preserved and once again playable to the public. The project aims to reflect the emergence of a profession from a hobby, the strengths and differences of the local scene and demonstrate its importance to international discussions of gaming. This presentation outlines the successes of the project and also the challenges for one cultural institution embarking on a new field of collection and preservation.

3:30pm – 4:30pm |
State of the States: Evaluating US Regional AV

Chair and Speakers
Siobhan Hagan, University of Baltimore
Anne Wells, Chicago Film Archives
Lynette Stoudt, Georgia Historical Society

Many archives throughout the United States hold unique audiovisual materials within their collections. The content of these records typically document the region in which they originated and include materials such as local television, industrial films, oral histories, or home movies. Just as each geographic area in the country has different weather patterns, industry, and demographics, each region must rely on itself to preserve the majority of its moving image and recorded sound legacy. This panel will discuss where each state or region falls on the preservation spectrum, the factors that contribute to the region’s preservation environment, and how things may change for the better in order to avoid a catastrophic loss of recorded American culture. The findings presented will be gathered from a recent survey conducted by the Regional Audiovisual Archives Committee (RAVA) to identify the under-served regions of the nation and to gain assistance from the more successful models.

3:30pm – 4:00pm
OSDPA: Video Accessibility on the Web and Open Standards

Speaker
Jason Ronallo, North Carolina State University

Video on the Web presents new challenges and opportunities. How do you make your video more accessible to those with various disabilities and needs? This session will focus on writing captions, subtitles, descriptions, and timed metadata tracks for Web video using the WebVTT W3C standard. Encoding timed tracks in this way opens up opportunities for new functionality on your websites beyond accessibility. The presentation will show some examples of the potential for using these standards in creative ways.

3:30pm – 4:00pm
Case Study: Audio Separation and Re-purposing and Restoration of Assets

Chair and Speakers
Derek Luff, XTracks
Vince Tennant, XTracks
Lars Bjerre, XTracks

This Case Study will focus on the separatation of music, dialog or vocals from composite mix elements. The technology provides options on how to restore, repurpose and monetize existing television, film and various multi media content that does not have available split track elements. Before and after examples will include: removal of a vocal track from a stereo orchestral film composite mix enabling a new enhanced score to be added, music removal/replacement in a foreign language television program, music removal/replacement in a domestic television show retaining the original sound effects and dialog so that new cost effective music with proper licensing can be inserted and the title distributed, and dialog removal from film for theme park applications .

4:00pm – 4:30pm
OSDPA: QC Tools: Official Launch

Speakers
Dave Rice, QCTools
Ashley Blewer, QC Tools

Quality Control Tools for Video Preservation (QC Tools) is an initiative to develop a suite of open source software tools, which can identify artifacts and errors prevalent in digitized analog video collections. The goal is simple: to cut down the time it takes to perform high-quality video preservation and direct time towards preservation issues that are solvable. A two year NEH- funded research and design project, QC Tools builds upon an existing error database, now aggregated and available to the public in the Audio/Visual Artifact Atlas (AVAA). For this presentation members of the QC Tools team will present the final tool, walking the audience through the process of analysis of digitized video files. Presentation topics to be covered include: The QC Tools User Interface, Overview of Analysis and Playback Filters, QCTools Building Blocks, and User Guide Help/ Documentation.

4:00pm – 4:30pm
BitTorrent and the Rise of Private Digital Repositories

Speakers
Mark Simon Haydn, McGill University
Justin Mckinney, McGill University

This session considers contemporary trends in digital access to moving image collections, with a particular focus on private digital repositories. Addressing issues around copyright, orphan films, and members-only online communities, the session will highlight the decisions facing guardians of moving image collections. Including case studies and examples of the approaches taken by individual archives, we aim to stimulate discussion around steps that might be taken by private digital repositories. Attendees are encouraged to share experiences of accessing and making accessible moving image heritage.

4:45pm – 5:15pm
Collaborative Linked Data Tool for Moving Images

Chair and Speakers
André Kilchenmann, Digital Humanities Lab, University Basel
Dr. Lukas Rosenthaler, Digital Humanities Lab, University Basel

Research on moving images usually presents difficulties because the dynamic medium is not so easy to grasp. Existing software solutions facilitate the task, but are often limited to the medium of film. At our institute, we are developing a virtual research environment called SALSAH (System for annotation and linkage of sources in the arts and humanities). The question we posed was, when we have the digitized data, what will we do with it? The answer: We will not just archive it, we will use it. SALSAH is a fully web-based platform that provides a private environment for researchers, and a restricted environment for public access. It provides tools for searching, annotating, marking regions on images, and linking diverse media objects. We are now also creating a new module for working with audio and video files.

4:45pm – 5:45pm
2-inch Treasures: Preserving and Appreciating Vintage Video in Cinema-Centric Cultures

Chair and Speakers
Mark Quigley, UCLA Film & Television Archive
Jeff Martin, Independent Media Arts Preservation
Margie Compton, Walter J. Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection
Dan Einstein, UCLA Film & Television Archive
David Crosthwait, DC Video

While many film preservation projects at major archives and studios enjoy public screenings in repertory cinemas and notice in the press, the preservation of vintage analog video by archives often goes unheralded, due in part to the complicated public performance rights issues associated with television and the fact that the artistic merits of the medium are generally devalued outside of select academic and professional circles. Despite the low-profile of these on-going video projects, the content being unearthed and preserved at archives such as Peabody and UCLA illustrates the immense cultural and historic value embedded within the perceived unglamorous realm of 2″ inch videoreels. A panel of archivists and experts will discuss the technical challenges of working with this material and present important recent finds from the cathode vaults.

4:45pm – 5:45pm
OSDPA: Lightning Talks

Topics and speakers TBD at conference via sign-up sheet

5:15pm – 5:45pm
Cynthia Maughan: Portapak Ophelia in a Clawfoot Tub

Speaker
Jonathan Furmanski, Getty Research Institute

This session is an examination of the Cynthia Maughan Archive at the Getty Research Institute. Maughan (b. 1949) created hundreds of videoworks during the 1970s that were notable for their ad hoc theatricality, deadpan morbid sense of humor, and intensely solitary relationship with the camera. The artist stopped making videos in 1981 and her works sat unwatched for decades on their original spools of ½ inch videotape. After extensive conservation and reformatting, the work is now poised to be reintroduced into a cannon of video art that has largely forgotten it. The speaker will discuss the challenges of stabilizing and transferring such a collection, and also include screenings of works that have not had an audience in over three decades. This session will be of interest to anyone wishing to learn about practical aspects of obsolete media restoration, twig funerals, file based video storage, dance prosthetics and novelty coconut bank comedians.

7:45pm – 10:00pm | Lucas Theatre
AMIA 2014 Awards & Archival Screening Night

Please join us to honor our 2014 AMIA Award honorees. Then, following the Awards is the 24th annual Archival Screening Night.

FRIDAY . October 10

8:30am – 9:15am | Vendor Café
Morning Plenary | The NEH and Audiovisual Preservation and Access

Speaker
Joshua Sternfeld, National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)

Senior Program Officer Joshua Sternfeld will discuss the National Endowment for the Humanities’ heightened special interest in audiovisual preservation. He will trace the Division of Preservation and Access’s support for digital reformatting, research and development, and education and training. His talk will conclude with a preview of the afternoon open forum to discuss the current and future needs of the field of A/V preservation.

9:15am – 2:00pm | Vendor Café
AMIA Vendor Café

9:30am – 10:30am
FiT: Film, Feet and the Photochemical: The Next Three Years

Chair and Speakers
Katie Trainor, The Museum of Modern Art
Andrew Oren, Fotokem
Janice Allen, Cinema Arts, Inc
Reto Kromer, AV Conservation and Restoration Scientist

Motion Picture labs are shutting with regularity; the equipment is being purchased by some existing labs with the intentions on continuing photochemical preservation. There are several archives still very dedicated to this way of preservation. This panel asks and aims to answer the following questions: Realistically, what are the number of films that an archive can commit to restoring for the next three years? Is there enough business to keep the few labs going?

9:30am – 10:30am
ABC’s of Video QC: Essential Steps in the Digitization Workflow

Chair and Speakers
Kimberly Tarr, New York University Libraries, Bobst Library
Kristin MacDonough, Bay Area Video Coalition
Kristin Lipska, California Audiovisual Preservation Project

An increasing number of cultural heritage institutions are embarking on projects to preserve their analog video holdings yet lack the infrastructure and resources to conduct quality control (QC) on the resulting digital files. As a result, digital files with video and/or audio issues, or improperly named files, are accepted as preservation masters. We’ll demystify QC by explaining what resources are necessary to ensure that the files received are the deliverables requested. One presenter will highlight process and workflow; another will discuss the benefits of referencing the A/V Artifact Atlas, which offers visual examples of the technical issues and anomalies that can afflict audio and video signals. We’ll also share a new publication that assists organizations initiate, define, and manage video digitization projects with vendors. At the conclusion of this 60-minute session, attendees will have been introduced to resources and tools to help them develop their own QC practice.

9:30am – 10:30am
Surveillance and Security in the Archive: Managing Sensitive Multimedia Collections

Chair and Speakers
Nicole Martin, Human Rights Watch
Molly Fair, Independent Archivist
Rachel Mattson, Independent Archivist
Snowden Becker, UCLA Moving Image Archive Studies

In an increasingly technologically dependent world where access to information is just a click away, we are more reliant than ever on digital tools and infrastructure that are easily surveilled, produce seemingly limitless records and data, and require security precautions to maintain basic privacy. Using four case studies, this discussion-format panel will provide examples of archivist’s relationships to surveillance footage within their collections and methods used to secure data and physical assets. Archivist Molly Fair discusses the ethics of archiving surveillance footage of student and union demonstrations. Nicole Martin of Human Rights Watch presents a guide to using open source encryption software to secure collection assets. Snowden Becker from UCLA’s Moving Image Archive Studies talks about evidence managers and their collections, and Rachel Mattson, former professor and iWitness Video collective member, speaks about digital forensics and her work archiving surveillance footage of police activities.

11:00am – 12:00pm
Capturing a Shadow: Digital Forensics Applications with Born-Digital Legacy Material

Chair and Speakers
Julia Kim, National Digital Stewardship Resident/New York University Libraries
Elizabeth Roke, Emory Universtiy
Peter Chan, Stanford University

“Digital forensics” is a buzz phrase repeated often in the archival communities today, but what does it mean? How will it apply to the backlog of born digital materials? Through a brief overview of digital forensics frameworks and applications in archival workflows, as well as several case studies, audience members will understand how better to approach complex materials on hard drives, floppies, and optical media. They will come away with an understanding of some of the key steps in a digital forensics workflow, such as write blocking, disk imaging, and intellectual arrangement. By drawing on several contemporary case studies recently made available to researchers, audience members will be better equipped to approach complex works on these carrier mediums, traditionally relegated to the margins of our discipline, which go beyond moving images to include databases, emails, and even software programs.

11:00am – 12:00pm
Pursuing PBCore: The Revitalization of a Schema and Community

Chair and Speakers
Casey E. Davis, WGBH Educational Foundation
Dave MacCarn, WGBH Educational Foundation
Jessica Bitely, Northeast Document Conservation Center
Jack Brighton, Illinois Public Media
John Passmore, WNYC
Mary Miller, Peabody Awards Collection Archivist

“PBCore is intended specifically for public broadcasters.” “Since we are not primarily an AV archive, PBCore is not relevant to our needs.” “PBCore is a little too intense for what we can handle.” “EAD is more appropriate for our AV collection.” Responses such as these flooded in after the PBCore Advisory Subcommittee launched its user and non-user survey this April. Conceived a decade ago, PBCore provides a simple and concise schema for organizing descriptive and technical metadata and sharing media items among and within organizations that deal with audiovisual materials. So why hasn’t PBCore been more widely adopted? Why are many media and archival organizations still unaware that PBCore exists? Why does it intimidate potential users? The panel will explore these questions and ask the audience for feedback on the most crucial question of them all: “What can we do to better serve the needs of PBCore’s intended community?” The work of AMIA’s PBCore Advisory Subcommittee will be discussed.

11:00am – 12:00pm
FiT: The Sustainability of Film Heritage within the Digital Economy

Speakers
Luca Antoniazzi, University of Leeds
Asen O. Ivanov, University of Toronto

The technological and economic shift of the film industry is creating both opportunities and challenges for the film archiving sector, bringing about new issues to be discussed. Among them sustainability has emerged as an important topic in the context of the digital preservation of media collections. However, the majority of the publications dealing with this topic rarely make reference to film heritage and film cultures. Rather, they tend to focus on economic, organizational, and infrastructural factors. As a result, much current research has neglected crucial cultural issues pertaining to the sustainability of film collections. This panel will focus on the sustainability of both born-analogue and born-digital collections in the current economic, technological and cultural context. It will enrich the debate around that topic by bridging information science and cultural heritage studies perspectives. The main objective of the panel is to initiate a debate that could lead to a more complex and thoughtful definition of sustainability as a guiding principle of collections management.

12:00pm – 2:00pm | Vendor Café
Poster Session: Friday Presentations

Doris Chase and the WCFTR: Creating A Culture of Collaboration at UW-Madison
Willie Thurlow, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Reasearch/UW-Madison

Ho’okele: Navigating the Moving Image History of the Hokule’a
Robert Omura, The Henry Ku’ualoha Giugni Moving Image Archive of Hawai‘i

Bridging the Gap: Social Media and Traditional Outreach Strategies
Amy Ciesielski, Moving Image Research Collections

Grassroots Digitization for Living Archives
Rebecca Fraimow, Dance Heritage Coalition

One Reel at a Time: Facing the Reality of AV Collections
Cynthia Ghering, Michigan State University Archives
Portia Vescio, Michigan State University Archives

Database Solutions For Archival Instituttions In Ghana
George Gyesaw, Institute of African Studies

AMIA Student Chapter at New York University 2014
Lorena Ramirez-Lopez, New York Unviersity
Carmel Curtis, New York University

System Anatomies of Metadata Extraction in Digital Video
Erik Piil, Anthology Film Archives

“It Shows Everyday Life”: Cataloguing Challenges in Bilingual Film Archives
Travis L. Wagner, University of South Carolina

BD-R Technology for Redundant Copies and International Standards for Long Term Archiving
Max Inui, JVC Advanced Media USA Inc

GE: Methodics of Digitizing of the National Film Fund
Miloslav Novak

12:00pm – 1:00pm | Sloane
Meeting: Preservation Committee

12:00pm – 1:00pm | Percival
Meeting: Advocacy Committee

12:00pm – 1:00pm | Verelist
Meeting: PBCore SubCommittee

1:00pm – 2:00pm | Scarborough 3
Nitrate Committee Presentation: Stages of Nitrate Deterioration – Does Cool and Dry Really Matter?

Speakers
Rosa Gaiarsa, UCLA Film & Television Archive
JeffreyBickel, UCLA Film & Television Archive

This open meeting of the AMIA Nitrate Committee offers a discussion on the stages of nitrate deterioration. The presentation will feature examples of stages of nitrate deterioration from two different processes: the slow aging process of the film itself, and the more aggressive reaction to extraneous materials, like film cement, tape adhesive and other film stock. The second part will show the effects of temperature and humidity controlled storage on the survival of salvaged nitrate film, after deterioration has been removed. Open to all attendees.

1:00pm – 2:00pm | Sloane
Meeting: Magnetic Tape Crisis (MC2) Committee

1:00pm – 2:00pm | Percival
Meeting: International Outreach Committee

1:00pm – 2:00pm | Verelist
Meeting: Education Committee

2:00pm – 3:00pm
Sailing the Ship: Supporting and Managing Change at Large Institutions

Chair and Speakers
Erica Titkemeyer, UNC-CH
Crystal Sanchez, Smithsonian Institution
Rebecca Fraimow, WGBH

For many large cultural organizations there is a significant gap between the institutional importance of audiovisual materials and the ability for large institutional systems to effectively support their reformatting, research, and delivery. New systems, technologies and procedures for handling audiovisual materials offer the opportunity for significant improvement in managing this complex content, but the bigger the institution the more complicated it becomes to implement necessary change. This proposed panel will focus on the challenges of introducing large-scale audiovisual preservation initiatives into existing systems, including case studies from UNC’s Southern Folklife Collection, the Smithsonian Institution, and WGBH. Panelists will present recommendations, lessons learned, and effective solutions employed in their own projects, with an eye toward global changes to collections-management with a variety of institutions.

2:00pm – 3:00pm
FiT: What to do With All Those Stinky Films: Practical Guidelines for the Identifying, Managing and Freezing Films in Advanced Stages of Vinegar Syndrome

Chair and Speakers
Rachael Stoeltje, Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive
Jean-Louis Bigourdan, Image Permanence Institute
Andy Uhrich, Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive

The panel combines scientific information on cold storage with the results of a real-world implementation of freezing films in advanced stages of acetate deterioration. The speakers will provide practical advice for collection managers dealing with “stinky” films worth saving. The Image Permanence Institute’s Jean-Louis Bigourdan will present on the science of vinegar syndrome and IPI’s tools for identifying and managing acetic acid deterioration in acetate film prints. The second part of the panel will be focused on a real life case of freezing a large quantity of deteriorated films at the Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive. Rachael Stoeltje will discuss the unintended creation of an acidic gas bomb that seriously corroded the $32,000 freezer. Andy Uhrich will follow up with how to properly freeze this material using step-by-step guidelines created by the National Parks Service.

2:00pm – 3:00pm
An Update on AS-07: MXF Application Specification for Archiving and Preservation of Video

Speakers
Chris Lacinak, AVPreserve
George Blood, George Blood Audio Video Film
James Snyder, Library of Congress

AS-07 is an MXF wrapper specification for the preservation and long-term archiving of audio-visual content. The effort to create the specification has been led by the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative (FADGI), and since 2013 has taken place under the auspices of the Advanced Media Workflow Association (AMWA). This effort has benefitted from the input and vetting of an international group of users, service providers and manufacturers. The result is a specification that has a high-level of correlation with Standards from SMPTE, ISO/IEC and EBU and thoroughly addresses the needs of archiving and preservation. The session will begin with an overview of wrappers to ensure a basic understanding of the topic before delving into a status update on AS-07 and its salient features. This will be followed by a detailed discussion on some of the more challenging elements addressed within AS-07, which make it particularly useful for archiving and preservation purposes.

3:30pm – 4:30pm | Scarborough 1
FiT: The Virtual Life of Film Preservation

Chair and Speakers
Erik Piil, Anthology Film Archives
Skip Elsheimer, A/V Geeks
Dave Rice, CUNY TV

Traditional practices in the preservation of motion picture film have progressed on long-evolving, finely-skilled techniques derived from optics, conservation, and chemistry. Alternatively the digitization of film now offers the moving image archivist a new set of techniques and refigured preservation objectives. This panel attempts to offer new approaches and analysis of the narrowing gaps of objectives and results when photochemical preservation procedures meet the new virtual reality. The session will explore options of film preservation planning and deconstruct digital formats and workflows currently common in film scanning, analyze the gaps of significant characteristics between a film print and its digital facsimile, and cover and compare use cases in film preservation underway this year.

3:30pm – 4:30pm
NEH Open Forum: Tackling the Big Challenges in Audiovisual Preservation

Speaker
Joshua Sternfeld, National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)

Following the morning plenary session, NEH Senior Program Officer Joshua Sternfeld will lead an open forum to discuss the pressing needs in the field. Preservation experts argue that we have a shrinking window of about 15 years to preserve the vast majority of our media collections on legacy analog and digital formats. Given the enormity of the task at hand, what strategies are available to mobilize the community? Where are the noticeable gaps in knowledge, resources, and infrastructure that may require additional research and development, educational opportunities, and collaboration? How might preservationists need to refine their daily workflows in areas such as assessment, appraisal, stabilization, and sustainability? What new ways might archives, libraries, and museums engage with users such as researchers, students, and the general public? Where might we find points of intersection between public and private interests? Participants are encouraged to come ready with ideas and questions for a lively, fast-paced discussion!

3:30pm – 4:30pm
We Do FFmpeg and You Can Too

Chair and Speakers
Morgan Oscar Morel, George Blood Audio Video Film
George Blood, George Blood Audio Video Film
Madison Stubblefield, Media Preserve
John Walko, Scene Savers

FFmpeg is a free and powerful open source tool that has a number of uses in A/V media preservation. It may look scary at first, but with the proper resources you CAN use it. Speakers at this panel come from various A/V preservation vendors. Each speaker will discuss how they use FFmpeg to enhance their digital workflows, from creating web accessible and DVD ready files, to dealing JPEG 2000 video files. This panel will also provide information about what to expect from legal and technical perspectives if you wish to implement FFmpeg at your own institution.

4:45pm – 5:45pm
Out of the Closets & Onto the Web: Digital Access & LGBT Archives

Chair and Speakers
Alice Royer, Outfest
Mark Quigley, UCLA Film & Television Archive
Todd Wiener, UCLA Film & Television Archive
Daniello Cacace, ACT UP Oral History Project
Karen Sundheim, James C. Hormel LGBT Center, San Francisco Public Library

A growing number of institutions are collecting LGBT moving images—long a critical component of queer life—and launching initiatives to ensure that the LGBT community’s previously hidden history is available for research and reflection. In the context of the current broader national conversation regarding LGBT marriage equality, gender identity politics, and human rights, now is the time to consider how those important collections might continue to play a role in building understanding within and across communities, and ask how they might be made accessible to larger audiences through the use of digital tools and related online access projects. This panel will focus on the significance of, and possible strategies for providing digital access to archival collections of LGBT moving images while also considering sensitive issues of privacy and access related to such materials, including home movies and erotica. Topics to be discussed include: funding, digital asset management, curation, user-end functionality, privacy, and ethics, all as they relate to the specific needs and goals of LGBT moving image collections.

4:45pm – 5:45pm
Digitizing Motion Picture Films: What are we Doing, and Why?

Chair and Speakers
Greg Wilsbacher, USC Moving Image Research Collections
Jim Lindner, Media Matters LLC
Ken Weissman, Library of Congress

In the transition from the physical to the digital it is vital for us to ask what we are doing and why we are doing it. Why is this so important now? Motion Picture film is expensive to access as a physical media. Digitizing film carries with it handling costs that will make repeating this procedure difficult to justify. Thus, we should consider what we want to accomplish in the long term (measured in decades and centuries) when we handle, process and scan films. Currently, this conversation has been dominated by questions of format, codec, and asset management. But these aren’t the only questions we should be considering if we wish to preserve the history of motion picture film culture for future generations.

4:45pm – 5:45pm
FiT: Obsolete Film Formats in the Digital Age: 3mm, The Smallest Gauge

Chair and Speakers
Jeff Martin, Archival Moving Image Consultant
Dino Everett, USC SCA Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive
Marsha Gordon, North Carolina State University
Reto Komer, Reto.ch

Following up on the very successful Fatally Flawed Film Format sessions of the past, this edition will focus on the smallest known film gauge ever used: 3mm. Panelists will discuss the history of 3mm, including its inventor, Eric Berndt; creating homemade 3mm acetate film stock; and the process of shooting and developing the 3mm film. A screening of the 3mm film will follow. This is an opportunity to discuss not only this format but the larger issues of saving obsolete formats in the digital age, and how archivists can be activists by continuing to exhibit fatally flawed technology like 3mm.

5:45pm – 6:45pm | Verelist
Meeting: Cataloging & Metadata Committee

5:45pm – 6:45pm | Percival
Meeting: Independent Media Committee

5:45pm – 6:45pm | Verelist
Meeting: Diversity Committee

7:15pm – 8:00pm
It Happened in 16mm: A Night of Regional Film

Chair and Speakers
Taylor McBride, Smithsonian Institution
Siobhan C. Hagan, University of Baltimore Langsdale Library
Amy Ciesielski, University of South Carolina
Kelly Haydon, New York University
Erica Titkemeyer, Smithsonian Institution Archives
Laurel Gildersleeve, University of Wisconsin- Madison SLIS

The Small Gauge Amateur Film Committee and the Regional Audiovisual Archives Committee are co-sponsoring a small gauge screening event that will feature 16mm film from regional archives across the country. The program will be curated from the collections of AMIA members, with a focus on RAVA’s committee members.

8:05pm – 8:50pm
Girls on Film: Juliette Gordon Low and the Girl Scouts

Chair and Speakers
Melissa Dollman, Crawford Media Services
Devin Orgeron, North Carolina State University
Katherine Keena, Juliette Low Birthplace
Melanie DeKerlegand, Vance-Granville Community College
Stephen Parr, Oddball Films

Savannah is the birthplace of both Girl Scouts and the organization’s founder Juliette Gordon Low. Join us for the panel discussion and screening, “Girls on Film: Juliette Gordon Low and the Girl Scouts,” during which we offer an inside glimpse at sponsored films for and media works made by Girl Scouts. Also present will be Katharine Keena, a representative of the Juliette Gordon Low Birthplace.

8:55pm – 9:40pm
Unsilent Savannah

Chair and Speakers
Timothy Wisniewski, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives, Johns Hopkins University.
Stephen Parr, Oddball Films/San Francisco Media Archive
Lynette Stoudt, Georgia Historical Society

This screening event combines rarely seen silent archival films culled from the collections of Savannah area archives, cultural institutions and private collections with live performances of new scores composed by local electronic and experimental musicians. The program will feature the Center for Low County Studies’ films of archaeological sites throughout coastal Georgia, Georgia Historical Society’s Home Movies of Johnny Harris (1940-1941), highlighting scenes of the popular Savannah barbeque restaurateur’s domestic life with his wife, their monkey, dog, and chickens as well as a variety of eclectic home movies and amateur films from private collections documenting life in Savannah. Musicians performing new scores at the screening include Jeff Zagers, who has toured extensively and has an impressive discography of releases on various record labels, and other active participants in the local avant garde music community, including Michael Christopher Walker, Gus Miller, and Ross Fish.

SATURDAY . October 11

8:00am – 9:00am
AMIA Annual Business and Membership Meeting

Members and guests are welcome and encouraged to attend the Membership Meeting to hear the annual “State of the Association” report, updates about current projects, and offer special recognition to AMIA members who have gone “above and beyond” in their service to all of us. The open forum will provide an opportunity to raise questions not addressed elsewhere in the conference. And at the end of the meeting, the 2014/15 Board of Directors will take office as we thank departing Board members for their great service to the Association.

9:00am – 9:30am
Morning Plenary | AMIA/DLF Hack Day: Results and Solutions

Chairs
Kara Van Malssen, AVPreserve
Steven Villereal, University of Virginia
Lauren Sorensen, Library of Congress
Hack Day Participants

Earlier in the week practitioners and managers of digital audiovisual collections joined with developers and engineers for an intense day of collaboration to develop and refine simple tools for digital audiovisual preservation and access. In this morning’s plenary, we’ll review their work and hear the results of some of these collaborations!

9:45am – 10:45am
GE: Online, On the Road, and Inside the Classroom: Advocacy Campaigns in Southeast Asia and the Pacific

Chair and Speakers
Irene Lim, National Archives of Singapore / SEAPAVAA
Sanchai Chotirosseranee, Film Archive Thailand
Karen Chan, Asian Film Archive
Mick Newnham, National Film and Sound Archive of Australia

Given that the audiovisual archiving movement is relatively young in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, advocacy is an integral part of the strategies and operations of institutions in the region to garner support, educate stakeholders, and promote their work. This session will examine some ingenious and engaging advocacy initiatives in the region including the Film Archive Thailand’s Film Rescue Van, the Asian Film Archive’s various educational programs, and the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia’s outreach services.

9:45am – 10:45am
Using Films: Reviving 16mm in the 21st Century Classroom

Chair and Speakers
Elena Rossi-Snook, The New York Public Library
Jennifer L. Jenkins, University of Arizona
Johanna Bauman, Pratt Institute
Roger Leatherwood Brown, UCLA
Carolyn Faber, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Antonella Bonfanti, Canyon Cinema
Jacob Barreras, University of Colorado, Boulder
Dwight Cody, The Boston Connection
Josephine McRobbie, Indiana University (alumna )
Asia Harman, Indiana University (alumna )

The goal of this panel is to bring together successful users of 16mm in educational contexts, and to demonstrate ways in which collections managers and film faculty can revive this format in 21st century classrooms. This session will engage the tension between conservation for longevity and archiving for access to original formats right now. It will also: raise awareness of the inherent value of the original format , argue for access to that format, propose the new model for success which partners librarians and educators with archivists. Audience members will be encouraged to contribute to a culminating discussion of the status, successes and obstacles in keeping film in the learning environment.

9:45am – 10:45am
Scholarly & Archival Activism: The Case of Felicia (1965)

Chair and Speakers
Dr. Jacqueline Stewart, University of Chicago
Skip Elsheimer, A/V Geeks
Dr. Marsha Gordon, North Carolina State University
Dr. Allyson Nadia Field, University of California, Los Angeles

This presentation focuses on Felicia (1965), a short documentary that tells the story of an African American high school student living in the Watts neighborhood of South Los Angeles, California, with her mother and two siblings. Made by three white film students while they were attending UCLA, Felicia is an exceptional document of life in Watts prior to the rebellions that took place in the summer of 1965. Skip Elsheimer will discuss how Felicia ended up in his collection and evaluate its status as part of a much larger collection of educational film materials, followed by a screening of his 16mm print of the film. Dr. Marsha Gordon will discuss how she came to work with the film and what her research—including finding and interviewing the three filmmakers and the documentary’s titular subject, Felicia, almost fifty years after the film was made—has revealed about the film. Dr. Allyson Nadia Field will discuss the scholarly, exhibition, and preservation work being done presently to ensure that this film does not disappear again.

11:00am – 12:00pm
American Archive of Public Broadcasting: A Community of Public Media Builds an Archive

Chair and Speakers
Karen Cariani, WGBH Educational Foundation
Lauren Sorensen, Library of Congress
Allison Smith, formerly of Wisconsin Public Radio
Nadia Ghasedi, Washington University Libraries
Casey Davis, WGBH Educational Foundation

On paper, the American Archive of Public Broadcasting is a collaboration between WGBH and the Library of Congress. In practice, it is a collaboration among public media institutions and collections nationwide. WGBH and LOC enable preservation and access by working to organize and sustain collections through the American Archive project that is active and engaged with the community at large. This panel will discuss future plans and vision for the collection’s growth and dissemination, progress on the ground regarding access, preservation and the collaborative model, as well as input from contributing stations and archives.

11:00am – 12:00pm
Teaching Film: Maintaining Small Gauge Film Education and Production

Chair and Speakers
Taylor McBride, Smithsonian Institution
Dino Everett, USC; Echo Park Film Center
Andrew Busti, University of Colorado at Boulder/Analogue Industries Ltd.
Peggy Ahwesh, Film & Electronic Arts Program, Bard College

Filmmakers and teachers discuss the current state and future of small gauge as an educational and film production medium. Panelists Peggy Ahwesh, Andrew Busti, and Dino Everett will use their experience as artists and film production instructors to re-enforce the importance of maintaining small gauge production as a medium for creativity and education as professional modes of production shift increasingly to digital. This will include discussing the inherent value of small gauge formats and its potential for wide-spread impact as a mode of expression, particularly for youth populations. Framed within the context of film archives, the panel will consider how the work of grassroots organizations to maintain small gauge education and production might inform the work of film archivists tasked with preserving and maintaining appropriate access to these materials. The panel will include projection of films created at Bard College, Process Reversal, and Echo Park Film Center.

11:00am – 12:00pm
GE: Thinking Solutions for Latin American Archives

Speakers
Juana Suárez, Proimágenes Colombia
Julio Cabrio, Universidad de la República
Paula Félix-Didier, Museo del Cine de Buenos Aires
Julieta Keldjian, Archivo Audiovisual Universidad Católica del Uruguay

As with most archives in the world, Latin American archives face the challenge of conserving and preserving a backlog of analog materials; at the same time, they are under pressure to transition to mass storage technologies, digitization, and orient their work to access. But audiovisual heritage has only been acknowledged as an important cultural element very recently in the region, which, in many cases, has not been translated yet into the funding policies that are required to achieve long-term preservation. This panel will discuss issues related to current practices and projects in amateur cinema, digitization, digital preservation, and film restoration in Latin America, providing a perspective of the state of the art in the region as well as presenting very innovative projects that have come to be with limited resources but a lot of wit, creativity, and enthusiasm.

12:00pm – 1:00pm | Sloane
Meeting: Online Continuing Education Task Force

12:00pm – 1:00pm | Percival
Meeting: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Committee

12:00pm – 1:00pm | Verelist
Meeting: Projection & Presentation Committee

1:00pm – 2:00pm | Sloane
Meeting: Access Committee

1:00pm – 2:00pm | Percival
Meeting: Regional Audio-Visual Archives (RAVA) Committee

1:00pm – 2:00pm | Verelist
Meeting: News, Documentary & Television Committee

2:00pm – 3:00pm
GE: International Film Production, Preservation, and Discovery: Two Stories

Chair and Speakers
Richard Fauss, West Virginia State Archives
Karan Bali, Filmmaker
Tina Anckarman, National Library of Norway
Xinyu Dong, Center for East Asian Studies, University of Chicago

This panel will feature two tales of international discovery, cooperation, and film heritage. The first presentation brings together Indian filmmaker Karan Bali and the West Virginia State Archives to talk about the creation of Bali’s 2013 film, An American in Madras. The film tells the story and accomplishments of American Ellis Dungan and his influence on Indian Cinema in the Tamil Region from 1935 to 1950. The second presentation tells the story of how at the National film archive of Norway, seven reels of Pan Si Dong, an important Shanghai production, regarded as lost by Chinese archivists, was found in the late fall of 2011. The discovery shocked the archival world and made headline news on China’s biggest TV channels.

2:00pm – 3:00pm
One Size Doesn’t Fit All: Three Contrasting Methods for Digitizing Moving Image Collections

Chair and Speakers
Rachael Stoeltje, Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive
Gregory Lukow, Library of Congress
Dino Everett, USC’s Hugh Hefner Moving Image Archive

Moving image archivists are still developing common digitization standards and every archive is customizing their digitization procedures and practices to fit local needs and budgets. This panel brings together three models that serve similar goals of providing access to collections but have different solutions to the challenge. Dino Everett will present on a one-person operation that relies on providing password protected individual access for researchers by digitizing the film in house and loading the files into Vimeo for user access. Rachael Stoeltje will present on the various digitization strategies at IU including: user requested, password protected access through AVALON, previous digitization projects currently available to the public and the larger digitization projects being considered for preservation purposes. Gregory Lukow will present on a variety of digitization on demand services for video and deteriorated film as well as their digitization for preservation purposes program.

2:00pm – 2:30pm
Unearthing the African-American Community Through Home Movies

Speaker
Jasmyn R. Castro, NYU Moving Image Archiving & Preservation

The portrayal of African-Americans in film has been much debated since the advent of the moving image. One of which being that African-Americans must be owners of media in order to be well represented in the media. There is no better demonstration of this than what is depicted in the home movies shot by African-Americans during the heyday of the 8mm and Super 8mm formats. In the Summer of 2014, Jasmyn R. Castro, set out to discover what was available in terms of the self-depicted African-American community. This presentation will focus on the African-American home movie collections available to researchers, scholars & enthusiasts, highlight and screen a small selection of what was discovered, and speak to the importance of everyday depictions of minority communities.

2:30pm – 3:00pm
Tracking Media Fragment Provenance & Derivatives With A Graph Database

Speaker
Laurence Cook, metaCirque

Would you like the power to quickly trace provenance of any clip within a derivative or edit master file at the touch of a button? Or, in reverse, trace all access derivatives from an original source? Would you like to learn how your existing metadata resources and workflows can be leveraged to harness the power of social networking software, enabling you to quickly discover relationships between essence fragments within and/or across media libraries? A data model that opens doors to more intuitive visualizations? Attendees will be introduced to the metaCirque graph database model, which provides an open source solution for tracking media fragment provenance, derivatives, content ownership and access rights. The model is extensible, and extremely scalable. It is also schema and unique identifier regime agnostic, placing identification emphasis upon a media fragment’s context, rather than requiring adoption of a universal naming convention for data integration. Come, explore the future!

3:30pm – 4:30pm
Click Capture, Press Play: Digitization Initiatives for Regional AV Collections

Chair and Speakers
Rebecca Fraimow, Dance Heritage Coalition
Julia Kim, National Digital Stewardship Resident/New York University Libraries
Hannah Palin, University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections
Pamela Jean Vadakan, California Audiovisual Preservation Project

Archivists have been warning of the dangers to obsolete audiovisual materials for decades – and people are listening. Although most content holders are aware of the need for preservation, the lack of funding and resources for digitization present obstacles. In order to meet this need, new initiatives are developing partnerships with audiovisual preservation experts and online archives to provide access to at-risk audiovisual materials and make preservation available to all. This session will provide information about three Initiatives–California Audiovisual Preservation Project, Moving Image Preservation of Puget Sound, and New York’s XFR Collective. Each organization is at a different stage in the process and will focus on the current status of their initiative. We will examine questions of sustainability, creative options for funding, and other challenges, and also discuss how other archivists can form collaborations to continue the process of helping organizations and individuals preserve and make their materials accessible.

3:30pm – 4:30pm
De-accession, Delete or Destroy: Removing Items from Collections

Chair and Speakers
Deborah Stoiber, George Eastman House
Jennifer Jenkins, University of Arizona
Steve Wilson, Harry Ransom Center

De-accessioning is practiced to refine, enhance and strengthen an institution’s collections. Materials can be removed for a variety of reasons, but there are key factors that can make de-accessioning difficult. For an archivist, analyzing collections for possible removal can be daunting when curators, collection staff, administration and the public are reluctant to dispose of any materials and may not always understand the implications as well as the benefits of the de-accessioning process. In this session archivists from a wide range of archives and libraries will discuss their core values of how, why and when materials are removed, allowing attendees to get a comparative look at de-accessioning across a variety of institutions, including materials held by, state universities, private museums and foreign archives. Case studies from represented archives will be presented.

3:30pm – 4:30pm
GE: Stop the Presses: Repatriating American Film Heritage Abroad

Chair and Speakers
Gregory Lukow, Library of Congress
Giovanni Fossati, EYE Film Instituut Nederland
Louise McCrone, New Zealand Film Archive
Ray Edmondson, Archives Associates
Jeff Lambert, National Film Preservation Foundation

In March of 2014, the National Film Preservation Foundation and the EYE Film Institute made a public announcement regarding a partnership to repatriate and preserve American films found in the Netherlands, majority of which don’t exist or are only extant in inferior prints on US soil. The EYE approached NFPF after learning about the much publicized repatriation project between the latter and the New Zealand Film Archives in 2010. A similar project, though quite forgotten, was the repatriation of American films from Australia between the National Film and Sound Archives and a number of different US archives during the early 90s. This panel aims to discuss how such big repatriation projects between two countries are managed and more importantly shed light on what happens long after the press releases quiet down.

4:45pm – 5:15pm
Finding the Silver Lining: Considering Cloud Storage, A How-To

Speaker
Seth Anderson, AVPreserve

Planning and decision making for any archives and preservation project is fraught with consideration and re-consideration of every detail. When evaluating cloud storage providers, it is dangerous to assume services are uncomplicated; that requirements for storage are obvious, and therefore inherently met by the service provider. There is no all-in-one solution that will fulfill every archive’s needs for storage of audiovisual collections. No two services are the same and the variance between services often represents the difference between successful implementation and a failed initiative. The difficulty lies in knowing where to begin and what questions to ask. Offering a place to start, this presentation will examine emerging use cases for cloud storage in audiovisual archives and propose nine valuable topics to consider when vetting storage services.

4:45pm – 5:45pm |
Bing Crosby’s Dictaphone – Recovering the Lost Voice

Chair and Speakers
Allan Falk, Post Haste Digital
Jim Allan, Post Haste Digital
Eric Dosch, Post Haste Digital
Robert Bader, The Bing Crosby Archive

In 1945, Bing Crosby acquired a piece of cutting-edge technology — the iPhone of his day. It was a Dictabelt, and he was using it two years before it was publicly available. With it, he recorded his thoughts, his ideas, his letters, and more. For over twenty years, he spent hours every day recording letters and more, generating thousands of recordings. Now, 70 years later, Post Haste Digital has unearthed machines, salvaged parts, and made repairs to rebuild an functioning Dictabelt, making these lost recordings available for the first time. This 60 minute session will be co-presented by Post Haste Digital and Robert Bader of The Bing Crosby Archive. We will outline the process and the technical challenges overcome in rebuilding this machine and restoring the materials. Mr. Bader will present an overview of the archive, and will feature never-before-released recordings – letters, interviews, and more — that have only recently been recovered.

5:15pm – 5:45pm
Digital Preservation for Technophobes on a Budget

Speaker
Susan Barrett, Arizona State University

Designed for participants who are unfamiliar with digital preservation, this session will present cost-effective strategies for digital asset management. Learn about digital formats, storage options and access models that can meet the needs of archives with limited budgets or technical expertise. You will begin development of a digital asset management plan using strategies that are flexible and responsive to the needs of your unique institution. Learn digital preservation best-practices, including metadata management and cataloging. Based on the Digital Moving Image Archives (DMIA) guide, participants will gain necessary knowledge to feel more competent and confident about digital asset management, managing digital accessions, and delivering educational outreach programs.

4:45pm – 5:45pm
GE: International Outreach and Exchange: New Models for Cooperation and Training

Chair and Speakers
Ray Edmondson, Archives Associates
David Walsh, Imperial War Museum
Mona Jimenez, NYU MIAP
Judith Opoku-Boateng, University of Ghana
Kara Van Malssen, AVPreserve

The hallmarks of any successful training or cooperative initiative share several common components: aligned goals and expectations, elimination of assumptions through understanding of local contexts, a focus on exchange over one-directional presentation, and sustainability by follow through. AMIA members have been involved in several global and regional training initiatives over the past few years that work to embrace these approaches, including NYU’s Audiovisual Preservation Exchange (APEX), ICCROM’s Safeguarding Sound and Image Collections (SOIMA), and FIAF’s School on Wheels. This session will present on the impact that these unique programs have through their training and networking approaches, both successes and shortcomings. Representatives from each initiative will present on the respective program’s philosophy and model and will discuss the outcomes, lessons learned, and identified areas of improvement. In the spirit of exchange, the final presentation will be from the unique perspective of an individual who has participated in all three of these initiatives, and who will present on her experience in both successful and unsuccessful cooperative initiatives.

5:45pm – 6:45pm
Closing Cocktails

7:00pm – 9:30pm
Global Exchange Screenings: An American in Madras and Pan Si Dong

Screenings will feature the two films discussed during the session, “International Film Production, Preservation, and Discovery: Two Stories,” part of this year’s Global Exchange Stream. There will be a brief Q&A following the screening of each film.

An American in Madras (dir. Karan Bali, 2013, 79 min) primarily traces American-born filmmaker Ellis R. Dungan’s years in India. Dungan made India his home from 1935-50 and became a celebrated director in the Tamil Film Industry based in South India. Born in 1909 and hailing from Barton, Ohio, Dungan reached India on February 25th, 1935 intending to stay for 6 months, but ended up staying for 15 years and making 13 feature films, 11 in Tamil and one each in Telugu and Hindi. During this period, he brought many technical innovations to the developing Tamil Film Industry of the 1930s and ‘40s, and infused a sense of professionalism into its filmmaking. All this, without understanding a word of the language! The film traces Dungan’s Indian connection right up to 1994, when on a trip to India, the Tamil Film Industry felicitated him in Madras for his contribution to its development, 43 years after he had left India.

In Pan Si Dong (aka The Cave of the Silken Web, dir. Dan Duyu, 1927, 60 min.) the pilgrim Tang Hiuen Tsiangs, sent out to search for the holy books, is caught and kept prisoner by seven beautiful women who turn out to be spirits of the Spider Cave. They try to force him to marry their leader, meanwhile his followers struggle to rescue him. Finally, after many failures, they succeed using advice from the White Goddess, and they set off from the cave. Pan Si Dong is full off magic and spirits with extraordinary powers. The moral is obvious: live wisely, don’t follow your desires, and if you conduct an ungodly life it will destroy you. Pan Si Dong was regarded as lost until 2011 when a copy was found in the vaults of the Norwegian National Library. The news about the find made headlines all over China. With its many beloved characters and popular actors Pan Si Dong set a new box office record in China in 1927. It is regarded as one of the most important films in the history of Chinese cinema.

The Preliminary Program

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