2015 Preliminary Program: Session Abstracts

Preliminary Program Sessions

This list will be updated and is subject to change.  Times and dates of each session will be posted in the next few weeks.  For a full list of workshops available, click here.

Wednesday | 8:00am – 12:00pm
Film Archives and Digital Humanities: Tools, Resources, Pedagogy

Chairs
Dimitrios Latsis, University of Iowa/The Internet Archive
Rick Prelinger, UC Santa Cruz/Prelinger Archives/Internet Archive

Speakers
Tara McPherson, University of Southern California
Mark and Tami Williams, Dartmouth College, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee
Rachael Stoeltje, Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive
Charles Tepperman, University of Calgary

This workshop will assemble curators, archivists, academics and digital humanists that have developed innovative platforms to disseminate the work done in film collections and enable scholars to have easier access to tools for both research and pedagogy. Participants will share best practices, discuss opportunities for collaborations and address challenges from a variety of leading Digital Humanity projects in the field of archival film, including: Media History Digital Library (U. Wisconsin), Media Ecology Project (Dartmouth), Scalar (USC), Avalon (Indiana), The Internet Archive and the Prelinger Archives.

Wednesday | 8:30am – 5:00pm
Copyright 101 for Moving Image Archivists Workshop

Speaker
Andy Sellars

Presented by Andy Sellars, this workshop will provide attendees with a clear understanding of U.S. copyright law and the special considerations for online archives under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Attendees will learn about specific issues associated with moving images and sound, as well as exceptions to copyright, including fair use and the specific exemptions for libraries and archives, and the application of these exemptions in the digital world. The workshop will provide opportunities for attendees to work in groups to assess the copyright status of materials, conduct a fair use analysis, and review sample deeds of gift to assess risk of making a variety of types of moving image collections available online. Attendees will also learn about a variety of open licenses that can be used with donation and production agreements, and discuss the importance of obtaining necessary rights for long-term access. In addition, Andy will discuss the various methods of digital streaming and digital access and how copyright law in other countries impacts international access to archival materials.Andy Sellars is the Corydon B. Dunham First Amendment Fellow at Harvard Law School, and a clinical fellow at the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic, based at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Wednesday | 8:30am – 5:00pm
The Third AMIA/DLF Hack Day

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 develop software solutions, documentation or training materials, and more for digital collections management needs.

Wednesday | 9:00am – 5:00pm
Shoot, Process, Project – A Hands on 16mm Workshop

Presenters
Dino Everett, USC Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive
Lisa Marr, Echo Park Film Center

In this workshop we will learn the basic concepts of analog filmmaking through two hands-on activities. For part of the workshop, we will also make our own films using direct animation techniques. In addition, we will learn about optical soundtrack and create our own soundtracks by manipulating and drawing onto the margin of film reserved for the soundtrack. For the second half of the workshop, we will load a 16mm camera with black and white reversal film stock. We will go outside and shoot the film around the hotel. We will then hand process the film to understand the basic process of photo chemistry. Finally we will project the two films we made to see how our decisions and manipulations ultimately look, to fully understand the start to finish creation process of the material so many of us deal with on a daily basis.

Wednesday | 10:00am – 5:00pm
Community Archiving Workshop

Chairs
Moriah Ulinskas, Independent Archivist
Yvonne Ng, Witness

Speakers
Taylor McBride, Smithsonian Institution
Sandra Yates, Texas Medical Center Library
Amy Sloper, Wisconsin Center for Film & Theater Research
Rachel E. Beattie, University of Toronto

Community Archiving provides moving image archivists the opportunity to serve the community of Portland and work with local volunteers to help an organization gain intellectual and physical control over an endangered moving image collection. The workshop provides a space for conference attendees to partner with local volunteers to conduct basic processing, cataloging and inspection of a moving image collection and, by doing so, will learn how to identify risk factors and make preservation recommendations for moving image collections.   Attendees will gain experience in working with and training non-archivists to care for their collections. In the process, they will engage in hands-on processing, inspecting, and cataloging audiovisual media. Most importantly, they will build relationships and connections with the Portland community and learn about local history.

Wednesday | 12:30pm – 5:30pm
The Reel Thing XXXVI

Wednesday | 1:30pm – 5:30pm
Get it in Writing: The First Annual AMIA Writer’s Workshop

Chairs
Melissa Dollman, Independent Archivist/Researcher + Crawford Media Services Consultant
Devin Orgeron, North Carolina State University

Speakers
Karen Gracy, Kent State University
Regina Longo, Albanian Film Institute + Film Quarterly
Donald Crafton, University of Notre Dame
Susan Ohmer, University of Notre Dame

Led by AMIA colleagues with experience on both sides of the writing process (Donald Crafton and Susan Ohmer: authors, professors and current co-editors of The Moving Image; Devin Orgeron: author, professor, co-chair of AMIA’s Publications Committee, and former editor of The Moving Image; Regina Longo: author and associate editor at Film Quarterly; Karen Gracy: author, professor and former editor of The Moving Image; and Melissa Dollman, author, rogue archivist, and co-chair of the AMIA Publications Committee), this workshop is organized under the premise that members of the AMIA community (academics, collectors, archivists, students, etc.) should be publishing variously and widely. Participants will learn the process first-hand while preparing a manuscript and/or proposal for potential submission. The workshop leaders will assist in drafting, help participants decide where to submit their work, answer questions, and give advice that will help participants navigate a process that can be intimidating.

By September 16. Applicants are required to submit a current CV, a draft (any stage – but no more than 8000 words) of the work they will bring to the workshop, and a brief (200 word) description of what they hope the workshop can help them achieve. This can be something written for a class that they were encouraged to publish, a piece that started as a conference paper, something they’ve begun on their own based on original research, etc.

By October 9. Applicants will be notified about approval for the workshop. Payment for the workshop must be within five days of approval.

Wednesday | 7:00pm – 8:00pm
Opening Night Reception

Wednesday | 8:00pm – 10:30pm
The Annual Trivia Throwdown

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Thursday . November 19

Thursday | 8:30am – 10:30am
AMIA 2015 Welcome: Celebrating 25 Years

Welcome to AMIA 2015!   At their 1990 conference in Portland, a group of F/TAAC (Film and Television Archives Advisory Committee) members proposed the creation of AMIA in a room at the Oregon Historical Society. And in June of 1991 the new AMIA held its first election.   This year AMIA celebrates its first 25 years.

Thursday | 10:30am – 6:45pm
The Vendor Café

Thursday | 11:00am – 12:00pm
Ensuring Trustworthy Audiovisual Human Rights Documentation Through Effective Lifecycle Management

Chair
Chris Lacinak, AVPreserve

Speakers
Stephen Naron, Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University
Grace Lile, WITNESS

The proposed panel features two organizations addressing the creation of human rights media and metadata, and associated management and access challenges. Stephen Naron, incoming Director of the Fortunoff Archive, will discuss logistical, legal, and ethical issues manifest in the planning, design, and implementation of security protocols and technology decisions related to provide controlled remote access to Holocaust witness testimonies. Grace Lile will discuss WITNESS’s ongoing initiative to empower video activists and citizen journalists to establish their own effective archival workflows. The panel will explore the relationship between the needs of creators and users of media related to human rights and the requirements of archivists, preservationists, and specialists in generating and managing it.

Thursday | 11:00am – 12:00pm
Opportunities and Challenges in Northwest TV News Collections

Chair
Elizabeth Peterson, University of Oregon

Speakers
Hannah Palin, University of Washington
Matthew Cowan, Oregon Historical Society
Pete Schreiner, Lewis and Clark College

Regional archives often count local television news among the largest percentage of their holdings, yet these collections often remain difficult to access due to limited staff, insufficient technology and murky copyright issues. Like many institutions, Northwest archives struggle with issues of access, copyright, and promotion when it comes to these diverse collections. This session will present various perspectives from three archives in Oregon and Washington with TV news materials. Attendees to this session will be introduced to the variety of local news programming in the Pacific Northwest, as well as strategies for managing similar collections at their own institutions.

Thursday | 11:00am – 12:00pm
An Amusement Fit for Half-wits: Partial Histories of Film Archives

Chair
Rachael Stoeltje, Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive

Speakers
Christophe Dupin, International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF)
David Walsh, Imperial War Museum

The notion of preserving for the future such a low form of entertainment as film (‘an amusement fit for children and half-wits’) was once dismissed as pointless and unrealistic.     In this panel Christophe Dupin looks at the beginnings of the archive movement with the founding of FIAF. He will address the four founding FIAF film archives and their early beginnings.   Following that, Rachael Stoeltje considers the phenomenon of accidental archives with the recent growth of the newly established almost unintentional archives.   And, then David Walsh examines how and why many film archives get things wrong….starting historically in the early days from duplicating and throwing out nitrate to more recent actions and choices that compromise collections and preservation.     The three panelists together form a historical timeline of oldest and newest archives, their histories and mistakes made along the way.

Thursday | 12:00pm – 2:00pm
Poster Session

Thursday | 2:00pm – 3:00pm
Beyond Oral History: Using OHMS to Enhance Access to Audiovisual Collections

Chair
Callie Holmes, Russell Library, University of Georgia

Speakers
Craig Breaden, Duke University Libraries
Ruta Abolins, Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection, University of Georgia

Are you troubled by the need to allow users to effectively skim and search digital audiovisual content? Do you experience feelings of dread when wondering how to make that happen? If the answer is yes, then don’t wait another minute, let OHMS help! Created by the University of Kentucky’s Nunn Center for Oral History, OHMS (Oral History Metadata Synchronizer) presents digitized content alongside a time-correlated transcript and index. With OHMS, users can quickly skim an index or use keyword searching to jump to a relevant moment in the online media. Best of all, OHMS requires few institutional resources for installation (and minimal ongoing tech support) and can be used with free online streaming services such as YouTube. This session will include an overview of OHMS implementation and workflows and will give examples of applications to non-oral history collections, including home movies, broadcast interviews, and field recordings.

Thursday | 2:00pm – 3:00pm
Managing and Marketing Your Archive for Cinema Exhibition

Chairs
Barbara Twist, Art House Convergence
Russ Collins, Michigan Theater

Speakers
Barak Epstein, Texas Theatre
Dan Halsead, Hollywood Theatre

This session will address the limited access to archival material by non-academic and non-industry film consumers by proposing an increase in on-screen exhibition via several ways: increasing cinema exhibitor access to archives, packaging archival content into series and shorts programs, and marketing your archive to cinema exhibitors directly or via a third-party.     Programming repertory and archival content are important cultural missions of many independent cinemas, yet they also represent a significant revenue stream. The audiences that frequent these theaters represent a more highly-educated and more committed moviegoer who is traditionally interested in archival and repertory screenings. The session will present several case studies of recently successful packaged archival and repertory series, including Martin Scorsese Presents: Masterpieces of Polish Cinema. The speakers (Russ Collins and Barbara Twist) represent exhibitors who regularly program repertory and archival content and the Art House Convergence, who represents hundreds of independent film exhibitors in the United States.

Thursday | 2:00pm – 3:00pm
The Long Goodbye: Curation Through Careful Deselection

Chair
Sean Savage, Academy Film Archive

Speakers
Stefan Palko, Academy Film Archive
Deborah Stoiber, George Eastman House

It’s not feasible to save all the media that arrives at our door, and institutions inevitably must come to terms with their limitations in collection criteria, storage and staffing. In this session, representatives from the Academy Film Archive (AFA) and George Eastman House (GEH) will trace the journey of a hypothetical collection (illustrated by several real world examples), from arrival at the institution, assessment and inventory, deaccession and disposal—in short, distilling a collection down to essential items that still honors the work, artist and/or donor. Stefan Palko will discuss managing the unprecedented volume of incoming collections, and AFA’s tribunal process. Sean Savage will present examples from processing the Saul Bass collection and others, and consider what effectively amounts to curation at this level. Finally, Deborah Stoiber discusses the GEH’s drafting and implementation of new deaccession policies, and contending with large donations of 16mm film, technical books and video items.

Thursday | 3:30pm – 4:00pm
Kim Jong-Il: Dictator, Cinephile, Film Preservationist?

Presenter
Justin Mckinney, Independent Consultant

This session examines the circumstances and creation of the massive private film collection by former North Korean Dictator Kim Jong-Il, with a particular focus on the “Resource Operation No. 100” that utilized state resources to acquire and copy films from around the world to build Kim’s collection, where they were stored under preservation conditions. This session will provide insight into Kim Jong-Il’s cinephilia and the potential value of this collection as both an archive of North Korea’s film history and a diverse international collection.

Thursday | 3:30pm – 4:30pm
Party Like it’s 1999: Emulated Access to Complex Media Collections

Chair
Julia Kim, Library of Congress

Speakers
Alison Rhonemus, New York Public Library
Donald Mennerich, NYU
Morgan McKeehan, Rhizome Art Base
Dianne Dietrich, Cornell University

Born-Digital material is pervasive, but where and how is it accessible, especially in the case of complex born-digital? In this session, we will highlight4 cutting edge use cases of complex born-digital emulations that have been made accessible to researcher. Panelists will highlight the work at Cornell University Library, New York Public Library, New York University, and Rhizome Art Base. This panel will offer multiple institutions’ perspective on using emulation, including technical challenges, documentation, and opportunities for future work and collaboration. Audience members are highly encouraged to bring obsolete CD-ROMs for a Rhizome-led workshop on Emulation as a Service. Audience members will come away with a good grounding of what is possible in emulation across different types of institutions and support structures.

Thursday | 3:30pm – 4:30pm
EXTRA: Examining AV Enterprise at a Regional Academic Archive

Chair
Molly Rose Steed, University of Utah

Speakers
Jessica Breiman, University of Utah
Tawnya Keller, University of Utah

In 1977, EXTRA’s dynamic mesh of critical exposés, in-depth interviews, short subject documentaries and experimental film represented a turning point for visual media in Utah and launched the careers of artists and journalists, who took advantage of new possibilities in production and pre-recorded programming. In 2014, a grant to digitize this local television newsmagazine became a turning point for the University of Utah’s AV Archive – a small division of the J. Willard Marriott Library’s Special Collections department – helping to redefine its operations and its role within the library. In this case study, the Marriott Library’s AV and Digital Preservation archivists will discuss not only the content and progress of the EXTRA project but also the significant institutional takeaways for regional archives and academic libraries just beginning to tackle their AV collections that resulted from the process as a whole.

Thursday | 4:00pm – 4:30pm
Fandom Despecialized: Fan Edits and the Search for Authenticity

Presenter
Jimi Jones, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

This talk explores the world of fan edits. One fan edit in particular, Star Wars Despecialized, represents an attempt by a distributed network of online Star Wars fans to create and disseminate a high-quality version of the film that represents its original, unaltered 1977 release. In this talk I discuss the phenomenon of this particular fan edit in terms of a search for the authentic, unadulterated Star Wars. I look at how this community collaborates, how it disseminates its works and what the resurrection of the original, authentic Star Wars means.

Thursday | 4:45pm – 5:45pm
How Motion Picture Film is Used to Preserve Moving Images

Chair
Tommy Aschenbach, Video & Film Solutions/Colorlab

Speakers
Walter Forsberg, Smithsonian NMAAHC
John Klacsmann, Anthology Film Archives
Bev Pasterczyk, Kodak

The conversation regarding moving image preservation has shifted from film to digital and, as a result, the knowledge of photochemical motion picture film technology is slipping away from the moving image archival community.    This presentation serves to reintroduce the moving image archival community to motion picture film/photochemical methods of preservation. Film not only provides the opportunity to recreate images in the manner in which they were intended to be seen, but also offers a long term preservation solution.

Thursday | 4:45pm – 5:45pm
From Acquisition to Access at the BFI National Archive: Case Studies

Presenters
Helen Edmunds, British Film Institute
Katrina Stokes, British Film Institute

This presentation travels the path with our film heritage from its acquisition to access. We will review the BFI’s on-going project to unlock moving image for new audiences with the digitization and publication of 10,000 films in partnership with UK Regional and National archives and rights holders. We will consider how the workflow processes developed for this mass digitization project are being utilized for other large-scale digitization projects, with a discussion on the BFI’s partnership with digital publisher Adam Matthew in a project to unlock for international higher education students a collection of largely previously unseen socialist propaganda films.

Thursday | 4:45pm – 5:45pm
Metadata Grand Unified Theory: PBCore, EBUCore, and the Semantic Web

Chairs
Casey Davis, WGBH Educational Foundation
Jack Brighton, Illinois Public Media

Speakers
Rebecca Fraimow, WGBH
Evain Jean-Pierre, EBU (European Broadcasting Union)
Morgan Morel, George Blood Audio/Video/Film

The adoption of PBCore in the United States has paralleled the rise of EBUCore in Europe as core metadata standards for audiovisual materials. During the past year, the two communities have formed a working group to explore ways to align PBCore and EBUCore for interoperability. Coinciding with the release of the PBCore 2.1 Schema in May 2015, it was decided to stop reinventing existing vocabularies, and instead leverage excellent work already completed by the European community. This paves the way for the adoption by PBCore of the EBUCore ontology, and unifying the vocabularies of both metadata standards. This means PBCore users can now also take advantage of EBUCore’s integration with RDF and semantic web applications. During this session, working group leaders from EBUCore and PBCore will tell the story of this work, and how it can be leveraged by users of both communities.

Thursday | 5:45pm – 6:45pm
Cocktails in the Vendor Café

Thursday | 7:45pm – 10:30pm
Archival Screening Night & AMIA Awards

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Friday . November 20

Friday | 8:30am – 9:15am
Morning Plenary Speaker

Friday | 9:15am – 2:00pm
The Vendor Café

Friday | 9:30am – 10:00am
Annotating and Mapping Ephemeral Films of National Socialism in Austria

Presenter
Lindsay Zarwell, US Holocaust Memorial Museum

Take a glimpse into everyday life in Austria before and during the Holocaust, and see what amateur filmmakers who were there saw. The “Ephemeral Films Project: National Socialism in Austria,” completed in fall 2015, has preserved, analyzed, and made accessible approximately 50 films related to the history of the Nazi period and the Holocaust. Learn about the features of this open-source, innovative web application and how to apply this new technology to your archival projects. The online film player pulls from a high-resolution film scan, which preserves both the structure and content of the original films, and combines a frame-by-frame level of analysis with dynamic annotations that synchronously change as the historic film plays. One can see a modern-day image of a building or the plotting of locations on an interactive map. This project provides an opportunity to reexamine the relationships between film, history, historiography, and technology.

Friday | 9:30am – 10:30am
Play Ball! Wrestling with the Challenges of Sports Collections

Chair
Hannah Palin, University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections

Speakers
Karin Carlson, Northeast Historic Film
Kimberly Tarr, Barbara Goldsmith Preservation and Conservation Department, NYU Libraries
Molly Rose Steed, University of Utah

Sports collections, typically representing decades of athletic competitions, are fraught with preservation challenges, funding issues, and licensing roadblocks that prevent free access and use. These materials are simultaneously neglected by their creators, fetishized by collectors, ignored by scholars and adored by fans. No matter how you feel about athletics in our culture, institutions ranging from small regional archives to large university archives inevitably wind up with sports-related film and videotape collections. As archivists, we have an obligation to make these materials available to our constituents, but how are we doing? Archivists from the Big Ten and Pac-12 sports conferences come together with Chicago Film Archives and Northeast Historic Film to discuss creative approaches to funding, copyright and licensing, digital preservation and storage.

Friday | 9:30am – 10:30am
Designing and Building the Post-Analogue Audiovisual Archive

Presenter
Jan Muller, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, FIAT/IFTA

This presentation addresses the challenges related to the role and function of audiovisual archive institutions as the environment they operate in becomes more and more digital and networked. The context is the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (Sound and Vision); a leading audiovisual archive that successfully made the transition to the digital domain. Its ever-growing collections today comprise over a million hours of audiovisual content – from film, television and radio broadcasts, music recording and web videos. Operating in such a new, post-analogue context has profound implications institutions must respond to. The fundamental challenge is how the public mission of archives (i.e. supporting a myriad of users to utilize collections to learn, experience and create) can be achieved in a digital context. ‘Creative Technology’ plays an important role in building the audiovisual archive of the future. To manage the transition, Sound and Vision launched a process of internal review and assessment. In the course of this two-year process, it drafted a new mission statement, defined a new strategic plan and built a new organizational structure from the ground up.

Friday | 9:30am – 10:30am
Adovcacy: Session 1

Friday | 10:00am – 10:30am
Providing Digital Access to C-SPAN’s Video Record

Presenter
Robert X Browning, C-SPAN

The C-SPAN Archives is twenty-seven years old and contains over 210,000 hours of free online, indexed, digital content that can be viewed, clipped, and shared. The collection won a George Foster Peabody Award in 2010 for these archiving and access efforts. C-SPAN is the only national network saving every minute of its three twenty-four hour broadcasts. All the video is indexed, much with closed caption or text searching with tools for viewing, clipping, and sharing online. Personal accounts allow one to save clips and get updates on programs, people and organizations.   This presentation by founder and director, Professor Robert X Browning, will focus on some of the challenges of creating the archive, how digitization and indexing is done, the present technology being used,  how access is provided to the public, politicians, journalists and documentarians, and the lessons learned in the almost three decades of the Archives.

Friday | 11:00am – 12:00pm
21st Century Film Preservation: A Case Study – Paramount Pictures

Chair
Andrea Kalas, Paramount Pictures

Speakers
Laura Thornburg, Paramount Pictures
Nikki Jee, Paramount Pictures
Sean Vilbert, Paramount Pictures
Charlotte Johnson, Paramount Pictures

In 2009, a new team was formed to take over the work of archiving at Paramount Pictures. The team needed to determine what films would be preserved, in what order the films should be preserved, what technical approach was best for films of every era. This panel will describe the steps the team has made over the last six years including the work to assess the condition of everything from original negatives to hard drives; to develop the process of prioritization; to establish principles of digital preservation.   The panelists are all members of the Archive team who have had direct experience with the approaches and workflows. Specific title-based case studies that demonstrate how theory worked in practice will be presented.

Friday | 11:00am – 12:00pm
Processing Film Collections Labeled in Non-Latin Alphabets

Chair
Liz Coffey, Harvard University

Speakers
Amy Sloper, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theatre Research
Travis Wagner, University of South Carolina
Spencer Churchill, George Eastman House

What do you do when a large collection arrives at your archive and it is all labeled not only in a foreign tongue, but also in a completely different alphabet? How do you identify titles and how do you catalog them? Different institutions have found different methods of tackling these issues, but one thing is common amongst them – the Internet is making this kind of work much easier than it was in the last century. This panel includes people from disparate institutions who have tackled similar collections in different ways. We will share problems solved, lessons learned, issues that remain to be dealt with, and the joys of sight-learning new alphabets.

Friday | 11:00am – 12:00pm
AO&U: Tools and Technologies for Enhancing Access to Audiovisual

Chair
Jack Brighton, Illinois Public Media

Speakers
Lai Tee Phang, National Archives of Singapore
Anne Wootton, Pop Up Archive
Mark Williams, The Media Ecology Project, Dartmouth College
Allison Schein, Studs Terkel Archive

A/V collections are increasingly digital; in theory, that also means increasingly accessible However, on the web, media has a distinct disadvantage — because it’s not text-based, it’s hard to search, hard to skim, and hard to share. More than for any other kind of digital collection, effective use of technology is crucial in helping users to discover and engage with digital audiovisual collections. Digital tools for audiovisual materials can allow collections to develop a meaningful web presence, improve searchability, create new distribution channels, and develop access points for users. This session will explore some of the technology currently being used and developed by audiovisual archives, libraries, and scholarly communities, such as speech-to-text software, data harmonization, scholarly research metadata, and online remix programs, and how these tools can be used to improve access to a/v.

Friday | 11:00am – 12:00pm
Adovcacy: Session 2

Friday | 12:00pm – 2:00pm
Poster Session

Friday | 2:00pm – 3:00pm
Automated Metadata Extraction – Where are we Now?

Presenter
Pam Fisher, The Media Institute (University College London)

Pam Fisher is Partner Manager at The Media Institute, based at University College London (UCL), where she develops industry-academic research partnerships. The Media Institute was formed to raise the level of volume of research performed in media-related technology areas, and to ensure world-class academic research is available to organizations of all sizes.  Pam has a background in technology innovation and in business process and strategy consulting, and divides her time between the Unites States and the United Kingdom.  She is a member of SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) and AMIA (Association of Moving Image Archivists) and has an MBA from London Business School.

Friday | 2:00pm – 3:00pm
Seeding and Leeching: Collaborative Preservation using BitTorrent

Chair
Justin Mckinney, Independent Consultant

Speakers
Mark Simon Haydn, Collections Manager
Rick Prelinger, UC Santa Cruz and Internet Archive
Ashley Blewer, New York Public Library

Using private tracker communities circulating film material as a model, this panel explores the potential for BitTorrent to work as a preservation tool. Studying the development of film sharing sites, and exploring the standards imposed on content and users, this discussion will evaluate the suitability of BitTorrent for creating an accessible, sustainable, stable network to aid the preservation of significant digital and digitized materials. Presenters will discuss the benefits and limitations of the protocol, and the work that can be done in the field to make decentralized hosting a feasible option for archives.

Friday | 2:00pm – 3:00pm
Reanimating Archives: Graeme Ferguson’s Multi-screen Polar Life of Expo 67

Speakers
Jean Gagnon, Cinémathèque Québécoise
Monika Gagnon, Concordia University

The presentation is a case study of the digital restoration and digital simulation of the Expo 67 multiscreen film, Polar Life, and its resulting exhibition presentation in Fall 2014. It explores the capacities of multimedia archiving to bring complex multiscreen films to expanded audiences through different access points of public presentation. Providing photographic documentation and descriptions of the restoration process, accompanied by filmed interviews with director Graeme Ferguson, and assistant editor, Toni Myers, this presentation will also show excerpts from the final digitized film. It will chronicle the partnership of institutions, scholars and film archives that realized the various stages leading to the restoration, exhibition and immersive screening of Polar Life.

Friday | 2:00pm – 3:00pm
Adovcacy: Session 3

Friday | 3:30pm – 4:30pm
Confronting the Crisis: Sustainable Preservation and Access Solutions at Scale

Chair
Joshua Sternfeld, National Endowment for the Humanities

Speakers
Chris Lacinak, AVPreserve
Rachael Stoeltje, Indiana University
Jean-Louis Bigourdan, Image Permanence Institute
Bono Olgado, University of the Philippines Film Institute

Recent work suggests that moving image preservation and access is in the midst of a “crisis” with a narrow window for taking action. Limited infrastructural and financial resources, coupled with expanding digital collections and the deterioration of magnetic media, could potentially lead to the obsolescence of much of our audiovisual heritage. This panel, structured as a series of brief presentations followed by an open discussion among panelists and the audience, will explore current and emerging options for conducting preservation and access at scale that can occur at the institutional, regional, and international levels. Sustainable options under consideration include basic assessment for at-risk materials, mass digitization, consortia planning, and preventive conservation of analog formats. The panelists will present a mixture of tools and methodologies coupled with anecdotal evidence of their real-world application that may assist preservationists in navigating this complex decision-making process.

Friday | 3:30pm – 4:30pm
Validate Your Digital Assets: PREFORMA, MediaConch and File Compliance

Chair
David Rice

Speakers
Ashley Blewer, MediaArea SARL
Ervin Verbuggen, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision

The EU-funded PREFORMA project aims to develop robust file validation environments through collaborations with archives, archivists, software developers, and other cultural heritage stakeholders. Erwin, Ashley and Erik will discuss file conformance checking and how the PREFORMA project envisions giving archives more control over their file validation processes. The panel includes a demonstration of MediaConch, an open-source file conformance checker from the developers of MediaInfo.

Friday | 3:30pm – 4:30pm
AO&U: Navigating Copyright to Provide Access and Use

Chairs
John Tariot
Andy Sellars, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School

Speakers
Casey Davis, WGBH
Janel Quirante, University of Hawaii – West Oahu
Nadia Ghasedi, Washington University

In order to maximize the potential of archival access in the digital realm, archivists need to understand the copyright issues, risks and exemptions, and the means of navigating those issues within their institutions. In this session, Andy Sellars will report on copyright legislation in the pipeline which will potentially affect access by libraries and archives. Casey Davis will discuss lessons learned through navigating copyright issues pertaining to digitized public media content in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. Janel Quirante will describe the experience and workflows associated with copyrighted collection material at the University of Hawaii, including donor relations and University of Hawaii’s levels of access based on a fair use analysis. Finally, Nadia Ghasedi will share some of Washington University’s copyright dilemmas and make the case for a copyright best practices guidelines for moving image collections.

Friday | 4:45pm – 5:45pm
Item vs. Collection Level Censuses in University Libraries

Chair
Tre Berney, Cornell University

Speakers
Josh Harris, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Danielle Mericle, Cornell University

Many institutions are planning campus-wide assessments of media holdings as a way to begin systematic digitization of content for preservation and access, or to make arguments for broader institutional support. Josh Harris, Media Preservation Coordinator at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Danielle Mericle, Director, Digital Media Group, Cornell University Library, and Tre Berney, Audiovisual Specialist, Cornell University Library will compare and contrast two methods of conducting a such an assessment, one which collects item-level data and the other which collects collection-level data. Both parties will discuss the decisions that informed their respective strategies, as well as the pros and cons of their approach. The overarching goal is to provide insight into what each organization did to identify need and scale of effort, make arguments for financial support, and how they went about shaping the necessary narrative for administrators and key stakeholders.

Friday | 4:45pm – 5:45pm
Digital Age Metadata Services – Making Strides toward a Broadcast DAM

Chair
Meghan Fitzgerald, HBO

Speakers
Meredith Reese, HBO

How can moving image archivists secure the support and resources needed for a Digital Asset Management system to effectively contribute to the business objectives of our corporate parent institutions? Three metadata specialists from the cable television domain speak about their experiences in the media and entertainment industry, on topics including: the changing technological landscape in broadcast media and the obstacles it presents, how to evangelize for funding and support, how to plan roadmaps and initiatives to make progress in the business world, how to collaborate effectively, how to build a proof of concept project, and what kinds of tools are necessary to move forward into the twenty-first century with audiovisual archiving and metadata management in a corporate environment.

Friday | 4:45pm – 5:45pm
Cataloging Home Movies: Current Challenges and Exploring Shared Solutions

Chair
Andy Uhrich, Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive

Speakers
Karianne Fiorini, Independent archivist and curator
Katrina Dixon, Independent archivist
Albert Steg, Center for Home Movies

Home movies present a number of challenges for catalogers. For example, many home movies do not have titles. Or, a short reel of film can include disparate footage shot in different locations over a long period of time. To deal with these problems, archives have created local solutions. This allows for the discovery and access of films in their collection, but it has resulted in a range in how home movies are cataloged.   This panel will examine current procedures used to catalog home movies to ask if there is a need for or interest in cross-archival standardization. Panelists will report on the findings of an ongoing survey of in-use techniques for cataloging home movies, present a case study on how a national film archive catalogs its home movies, and argue that tropes may present a more useful classificatory metric for home movies than subject headings or genres

Friday | 4:45pm – 5:45pm
Understanding What Users Need to Understand Us (and Our Data)

Chair
Jean-Pierre Evain, EBU

Speakers
Amy Ciesielski, University of South Carolina
Sadie Roosa, WGBH
Ed Benoit, Louisiana State University
Laura Treat, University of North Texas
Julie Judkins, University of North Texas

How do different types of users access media archives? What are the searching methods of different types of users? How do archives take these needs into account in providing high quality and necessary descriptive metadata about moving image collections? Some archives have sought engagement with users to crowdsource description of archival holdings; what are the key differences in crowdsourcing requirements for moving image collections? These questions have largely been answered in general archival literature, but until now they have not been addressed in the area of audiovisual collections. Amy Ciesielski will present her research on user needs analysis of digital moving image collections. Laura Treat and Julie Judkins will report on their preliminary findings of research into the information seeking behaviors of documentary filmmakers. Ed Benoit will report on research in crowdsourcing metadata for audiovisual collections. Sadie Roosa will discuss her workflows and experiences establishing guidelines for “Minimum Viable Cataloging” through the American Archive of Public Broadcasting.

Friday | 7:30pm – 8:30pm
Report: Chicago’s First Home Video Day

Chair
Sara Chapman, Media Burn Archive

Speakers
Carolyn Faber, Flaxman Library, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Doug McLaren, The Nightingale
Andy Uhrich, Center for Home Movies
Dan Erdman, independent archivist

Home Video Day is a new spin on Home Movie Day, an international annual event held since 2002 that focuses on celluloid home movies–8mm, 16mm, and Super-8. Yet families and communities everywhere have also been videotaping public and private life for about three decades now, and few people realize just how endangered these documents of people’s history really are. Home Video Day is an engaging and fun way for the archival community to raise awareness about the importance of personal archiving, and it provides a communal experience that is hilarious, touching and uncomfortable in a way that only home video can be! The organizers of the first Chicago Home Video Day will discuss the success of their 2015 event and provide attendees with a blueprint to launch HVDs across the country. We will also screen some of the funny, heartwarming, and just plain baffling home videos that turned up at our Chicago event.

Friday | 8:35pm – 9:35pm
Reframing Portland (LIVE)

Presenters
Timothy Wisniewski, Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions
Stephen Parr, Oddball Films, San Francisco Media Archive
Terry Baxter, Multnomah County Archives

This special screening event features live projections of expanded moving image works by local filmmakers and video artists using archival footage culled from the collections of Portland area archives and private collections with live scores performed by local musicians. Archival sources include color footage documenting the Vanport, Oregon Flood of 1948. Vanport was home to many of the workers that came to Portland during WWII to aid the war effort, and was the center of the African American community in Portland from WWII until the time of the flood. Other films include glimpses behind the scenes at the Oregon Health & Science University Hospital in the early 1940s and vibrant Kodachrome footage of the Victory Loan Company’s late 1930s talent show.

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Saturday . November 21

Saturday | 9:45am – 10:45am
Archival Education in Transition: Taking Stock

Chairs
Snowden Becker, UCLA
Eef Masson, University of Amsterdam

Speakers
Jeffrey Stoiber, George Eastman House/Selznick School of Film Preservation
Howard Besser, NYU MIAP
Eric Rosenzweig, FAMU
Madeline Bates, Creative Skillset

With new audiovisual archiving and preservation programs launching in London, Prague, Frankfurt and Potsdam, and significant changes taking place in some of the longest-running degree programs in this field, it’s time to take stock of the state of professional education in audiovisual preservation and archiving. Representatives from new and established programs will provide comprehensive updates on their successes (and frustrations) to date, as well as their current status, philosophical approaches, and future plans.

Saturday | 9:45am – 10:45am
Circumscribing the World of Indie Cinema: Collection, Preservation, and Naming Challenges

Chair
Sandra Schulberg, Laboratory for Icon & Idiom, Inc.

Speakers
Israel Ehrisman, Laboratory for Icon & Idiom
Ed Carter, Academy Film Archive
Tanya DeAngelis, Sundance Institute
Shola Lynch, NYPL, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

The non-profit organization, Laboratory for Icon & Idiom, launched the IndieCollect campaign to create a comprehensive catalogue of American independent films and to facilitate their preservation. How does one define “independent” film? What constitutes an American indie Latino, Asian American, African American or LGBT film? How does one determine what “independent” films are already held by collaborating archives? How can filmmakers work with film archives to find homes for the vast numbers of indie films that may soon be “homeless” if provision isn’t made to secure long-term storage. How can those who have a stake in preserving indie films educate makers about the challenges of preservation in the digital age? This case study includes a virtual tour of the IndieCollect Index, plus a discussion of these key questions with representatives from some of IndieCollect’s main collaborators.

Saturday | 9:45am – 10:45am
Preserving Film Collections for the Future: An Essential New Web Application

Chair
Jean-Louis Bigourdan, Image Permanence Institute/RIT

Speakers
Alex Bliss, Image Permanence Insitute/RIT
Shannon Fitzpatrick, BrainPOP

Implementing the best possible preservation strategy is an intricate and difficult process. IPI worked on an NEH-funded project to create a web-based application called filmcare.org. The objective of the project was to design a tool for self-education and to provide an easy-to-implement decision-making platform for preserving film materials. In essence, filmcare.org is designed to bridge the gap between what is known today about film stability and what can be done to make preservation efforts in any repositories a reality. filmcare.org provides access to critical information in a concise format, and most noticeably guides preservationists through the process of making informed decisions on optimizing the longevity of film collections. Many otherwise tedious tasks are facilitated by filmcare.org to make collection personnel self-reliant in their effort to preserve film materials. During the session, panelists will present for the first time filmcare.org, discuss its origin, purpose, methodology and architecture in an attempt to foster film preservation efforts and sustain them over time.

Saturday | 11:00am – 12:00pm
AO&U: Moving Beyond Access: Unlocking the Potential of Moving Image Archival Collections

Chair
Johan Oomen, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision

Speakers
Erica Titkemeyer, Southern Folklife Collection, UNC Chapel Hill
Lily Troia, Simmons College
John Campopiano, Frontline
Jennifer Steele, YOUmedia, Chicago Public Librariy Foundation

Once the public has access to our digital moving image collections, what can they do with them? This presentation will focus on ways that archives can inspire users such as scholars, educators, students, artists, journalists, etc., to use their collections in innovative and nontraditional ways. How can archivists encourage experiential and inquiry-based use of moving image collections for research and learning? The presentations will cover methodologies, experiments, and report on meetings with scholars on ways of using moving image collections to the full potential of their value. Finally, this session will discuss some of the implications for archives of these less traditional uses of the materials and how this might affect moving image archives in the long term.

Saturday | 11:00am – 12:00pm
Competency-Based Frameworks for Moving Image Archiving Education

Chair
Kelle Anzalone, Mission Hills High School

Speakers
Karen Gracy, Kent State University
Dino Everett, Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive

This session will consider the potential for competency-based pedagogical frameworks to shape moving image archiving education. Presenter Karen Gracy will offer an orientation to the core competency model and how it might be applied in the moving image archiving domain for graduate-level and continuing education programs. USC Moving Image Archivist Dino Everett will also be addressing how competency-based educations can and will better suit employers looking to hire students fresh out of master programs.

Saturday | 12:00pm – 2:00pm
Poster Session

Saturday | 2:00pm – 3:00pm
Home Movie Registry: A Model for Uniting Collections & Users

Chair
Dwight Swanson, Center for Home Movies

Speakers
Skip Elsheimer, A/V Geeks, Center for Home Movies
Jasmyn Castro, National Museum of African American History and Culture
Rick Prelinger, UC Santa Cruz/Internet Archive

The Home Movie Registry is an online portal that aggregates the catalog records and digitized files of amateur film and video in one central location. The Registry is a curated search engine for amateur films. It doesn’t replace the efforts of film archives and their online presence but is a new way to show researchers and site visitors the home movies these collecting institutions have.   The Registry is a new project of the Center for Home Movies (CHM) in partnership with a number of moving image archives and, eventually, any individual with films or videos of their family. The Registry is a work in progress. Originally built on the open source platform Omeka and later migrated to WordPress, the Registry has evolved quite a bit since it was first conceptualized. This plenary will serve as an official launch of the Home Movie Registry to the AMIA community, as well as a case study in how to turn big ideas into a reality through the utilization of low-cost readily available online tools (and a bit of hard work!).

Saturday | 2:00pm – 3:00pm
Growing a Global Slow Film Movement – Case Study L.A. Filmlab

Chair
Dino Everett, USC Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive

Speakers
Kevin Rice, Process Reversal
Lisa Marr, Echo Park Film Center

This project marks the first time a traditional film archive will be building a film lab that will be made available to the artist community free of charge. Artist run film labs have existed for some time, but are often looked down upon by archives as a subpar solution to preserving film. This project aims to create a space that can both accommodate the artist, but also exist on a high enough quality level to benefit the archivist. Hopefully the L.A. FilmLab will be the first of many new small labs that benefit from the collective knowledge of multiple communities all interested in the same goal of keeping the film medium viable. The panel will feature representatives from each of the three groups involved in the creation of this lab in a discussion of how it came to be, and how collectively more labs can follow.

Saturday | 2:00pm – 3:00pm
AO&U: Methodologies for Assessment and Evaluation of Access to Moving Image Collections

Chair
Dave Rice, CUNY

Speakers
Karen Cariani, WGBH
Deborah Steinmetz, Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive
Eric Saltz, NC A&T State University

Understanding the needs and expectations of users is critical to providing access to moving image archival collections. In developing preservation and access systems, archives can engage with users in the development and design phase, assessing the needs to determine functional requirements. After an archive launches new initiatives to provide access to its collections, evaluation is necessary to monitor program success and to ensure that user needs are being met. During this session, panelists will discuss methodologies of user-centered design and evaluation, including both qualitative and quantitative forms of research.

Saturday | 3:30pm – 4:30pm
The Environmental Impact of Digital Preservation

Presenter
Linda Tadic, Digital Bedrock

Archives with audiovisual collections are racing the clock to digitize video and audio tape before total media failure and obsolescence. The resulting digital files are stored on spinning disk (servers, hard drives) and/or digital tape, both of which will fail or become obsolete in time and must be replaced. As collections are digitized, millions of audio and video recordings will be discarded globally in the coming years. Much magnetic media and e-waste goes to landfills and are incinerated, creating a toxic environment for humans. According to the 2013 Blacksmith Institute report, an e-waste processing center in Ghana was the most toxic site on the planet — ahead of Chernobyl. Media disposal is not the only area where audiovisual and digital preservation impacts the environment. The process of keeping digital files alive over time requires power and natural resources. How will our media and digital archives contribute to damaging the planet, and what can be done to mitigate our actions? Digital collections could require a stricter appraisal and selection policy than legacy collections to decrease the amount of digital content that is saved. This paper will outline possible options to decrease the collective “carbon footprint” while sustaining digital content entrusted to archives.

Saturday | 3:30pm – 4:30pm
Sustaining Consistent Video Presentation

Presenters
Dave Rice, CUNY Television
Kelly Haydon, BAVC

Instead of video decks and projectors, archivists increasingly rely on software to render an authentic presentation of audiovisual content. However, the same file may appear differently from one player to another with discrepancies in significant characteristics such as color, contrast, aspect ratio, or even duration. This presentation investigates aspects of the design and decisions within digital media that impact the consistency of video presentation from one playback device to another. Archival strategies such as migration, emulation, and normalization are evaluated according to their potential impact on presentation consistency. Although the technological diversity and complexity of codecs, containers and implementations within digital video collections challenge one-sized presentation solutions; the panel will go behind-the-scenes within playback software. Details and qualities about digital video that are often unseen shall be scrutinized in order to provide more technical control over digital content and better understanding of the challenges involved in sustaining consistent video presentation.

Saturday | 3:30pm – 4:30pm
AO&U: Keeping it Real: Providing Access to Physical Collections

Chair
Dan Erdman

Speakers
Chris Lacinak, AVPreserve
Elena Rossi-Snook, Reserve Film and Video Collection, The New York Public Library
Jennifer Jenkins, University of Arizona
John Vallier, University of Washington
Andrew Weaver, University of Washington

As the physical technology of film and analog a/v materials becomes increasingly unfamiliar to new generations of users, archivists are responding with increasingly innovative methods of making sure that physical collections remain useful and accessible. In this session, archivists working with physical film and video collections will report on their experiments with turning libraries into spaces for interacting with film, bringing archival materials into the classroom, using open-source applications and improved workflows for discovery of analog video, and encouraging the remix, reuse, and re-imagining of physical media.

Saturday | 4:45pm – 5:15pm
Through Chaos Comes Clarity: Building, Implementing & Promoting Taxonomy for Media Collections

Presenters
Kathryn Gronsbell, Carnegie Hall
Sarah Knight, NPR

Well-controlled descriptive metadata enables audiovisual collections to be accessible; organizations should be equipped with practical knowledge about taxonomy development and implementation. This session provides basic information about common practices that may help organizations determine the benefits of pursuing or resurrecting various types of vocabularies. The session will include a brief primer on taxonomy basics, sharing lessons learned from Carnegie Hall’s recent digital asset management efforts which included locally-developed vocabulary structures.  In addition, the session will explore NPR’s strategic approach to taxonomy, with a focus on the organization’s unique business cases and audiences.  The speakers aim to ground the introductory conversation in real-world terms and open the floor for exploratory conversation about taxonomy and its relationship to media collections.

Saturday | 4:45pm – 5:45pm
Mistakes Were Made: Lessons in Trial and Error from NDSR

Chair
Kristin MacDonough, Video Data Bank

Speakers
Shira Peltzman, UCLA Library
Julia Kim, Library of Congress
Rebecca Fraimow, WGBH

Sometimes it feels like half of digital preservation is just copying files from one place to another — but even something that simple in theory can go wildly wrong in practice. This session will use a series of case studies to demonstrate some of the unexpected failures that can be encountered in theoretically routine digital archiving workflows. From pulling corrupted files off of old hard drives, to shoving round file type pegs through square emulation holes, to shaking legacy LTO tapes and seeing what falls out, the presenters will go through their experience in troubleshooting tech failure in digital archives and encourage attempts at finding solutions beyond ‘bang your head against a wall until you don’t care anymore.’

Saturday | 4:45pm – 5:45pm
AO&U: Apples and Oranges: Providing Meaningful Access to Mixed Media Collections

Chair
Elizabeth Walters, Harvard University

Speakers
Alan Gevinson, Library of Congress
Mary Miller, Peabody Awards Collection, University of Georgia
Stephanie Sapienza, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities

Media doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Much of the audiovisual material housed in archival collections is linked to a web of related textual and material documentation — transcripts, press scripts, correspondence, production notes, etc. — which provides important context and add value for researchers and the public. However, in many cases, the media and related paper/textual collections are accessioned and processed using very different and separate techniques, guidelines, and description schemas. In some cases, the materials are separated geographically as well as intellectually, making it even more difficult for users to understand and make use of the full potential of the material. This session will discuss the specific challenges and benefits of providing meaningful access to mixed-media collections, with a focus on methods for using text and documents to contextualize audiovisual materials.

Saturday  |  5:45pm – 6:45pm
Closing Cocktails

Saturday | 7:30pm – 8:15pm
Screening

Saturday | 8:15pm – 9:15pm
It Happened in 16mm: A Night of Regional Film, Part Deux

Chair
Taylor McBride, Smithsonian Institution
Siobhan C. Hagan, University of Baltimore Langsdale Library

Speakers
Amy Ciesielski, University of South Carolina
Kelly Haydon, BAVC
Erica Titkemeyer, UNC Chapel Hill
Laurel Gildersleeve, Harvard Film Archive

The Small Gauge Amateur Film Committee (SGAFC) and the Regional Audiovisual Archives Committee (RAVA) are co-sponsoring the second annual small gauge regional film screening event to take place during the Portland conference (a continuation of the event that began in Savannah). The program will occur in the evening in the conference hotel or a local microcinema and will be curated from the collections of RAVA’s institutional members and local regional archives. It will feature 16mm film from regional archives highlighting content of the Portland/Pacific NW region.