2017 Session Presentations

The Films of Expo 67 – 50 Years Later (pdf)

  • Steve Moore, Library and Archives Canada
  • Stéphanie Côté, Cinemathèque québécoise

Film was an integral part of the Expo 67 experience. Held in Montreal 50 years ago during Canada’s centennial year, Expo 67 is considered the most successful world’s fair of the 20th century. Some of that success can be attributed to the innovative use of moving images: experiments in presentation, projection, use of screens, and a re-thinking of the concept of watching a film including full immersion in the audiovisual.   This session will include clips from some of the films shown at Expo. Panelists will discuss some of the challenges with archiving these films, of providing access to what were once-in-a-lifetime visual experiences designed in tandem with the architecture where the buildings were an integral part of the film presentation. The metadata explaining how the elements were screened is often missing and what is left are the component parts of the final experience.

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Digital Preservation of National Cultural Heritage  Challenge and Solution: Cmam  (ppt)

  • Sami Meddeb, Elgazala Technoparck

Methodologies for the long-term conservation of the national heritage through the transfer and migration of analog data and rare personal musical archives  of singer  in digital format while respecting international standards and using appropriate metadata

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Let the Computer and the Public do the Metadata Work!

  • Karen Cariani, WGBH Educational Foundation
  • Tali Singer, Pop Up Archive
  • Tanya Clement, University of Texas at Austin, School of Information

The American Archive of Public Broadcasting, with Pop Up Archive, has created more than 71,000 transcripts of historic public broadcasting recordings using the open source Kaldi speech-to-text software. WGBH will share a game called FixIt to crowdsource correction of speech-to-text generated transcripts. Panelists will discuss potential computational linguistic tools and methodologies to enhance discoverability of digital media collections. The session will demonstrate the results of 1) work with HiPSTAS at University of Texas-Austin, who have conducted soundwave analysis and pattern recognition on a sampling of content in the archive, 2) the output and of the speech-to-text tools including name, topic and location recognition, as well as the implementation of this data to aid in search and discovery 3) methodologies and workflows around crowdsourcing the correction of transcripts and 4) Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision use of automatic speaker labeling and thesaurus label extraction from subtitles to achieve fine-grained access.

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An Audiovisual Metadata Platform to Support Mass Description (pdf)

  • Jon W. Dunn, Indiana University
  • Chris Lacinak, AVPreserve
  • Tanya Clement, University of Texas at Austin

In recent years, concern over the longevity of physical AV formats due to media degradation and obsolescence, combined with decreasing cost of digital storage, have led libraries and archives to embark on projects to digitize recordings for purposes of long-term preservation and improved access. Beyond digitization, in order to facilitate discovery, AV materials must also be described, but many items and collections lack sufficient metadata. Indiana University is partnering with experts from the University of Texas at Austin and AVPreserve to explore the design of a software platform to support the incremental application of automated and human-based processes to create and augment metadata for AV collections. In this session, we will describe the proposed technical architecture for this system, dubbed the Audiovisual Metadata Platform (or AMP), discuss the use cases and technical considerations that informed its design, and discuss next steps toward implementation.

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Good Enough to Best: Tiered Born-Digital AV Processing

  • Julia Kim, Library of Congress
  • Erica Titkemeyer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  • Rebecca Fraimow, WGBH

Born-Digital audiovisual files continue to present a conundrum to archivists in the field today: should they be accepted as-is, transcoded, or migrated? Is transcoding to a recommended preservation format always worth the potential extra storage space and staff time? If so, what are the ideal target specifications? In this presentation, individuals working closely with born-digital audiovisual content from the University of North Carolina, WGBH, and the American Folklife Center at the Library of Conference will present their own use cases involving collections processing practices, from “best practice” to the practical reality of “good enough”. These use cases will highlight situations wherein video quality, subject matter, file size and stakeholder expectations end up playing important roles in directing the steps taken for preservation. From these experiences, the panel will put forth suggestions for tiered preservation decision making, recognizing that not all files should necessarily be treated alike.

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Put it on your Bucket List: Navigating Copyright to Expose Digital AV Collections at Scale

  • Casey Davis Kaufman, WGBH Educational Foundation
  • Jay Fialkov, WGBH Educational Foundation
  • Hope O’Keeffe, Library of Congress

Digitized collections often remain almost as inaccessible as they were on their original analog carriers, primarily due to institutional concerns about copyright infringement and privacy. The American Archive of Public Broadcasting has taken steps to overcome these challenges, making available online more than 22,000 historic programs with zero take-down notices since the 2015 launch. This copyright session will highlight practical and successful strategies for making collections available online. The panel will share strategies for: 1) developing template forms with standard terms to maximize use and access, 2) developing a rights assessment framework with limited resources (an institutional “Bucket Policy”), 3) providing limited access to remote researchers for content not available in the Online Reading Room, and 4) promoting access through online crowdsourcing initiatives.

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Building the AAPB: Inter-Institutional Preservation and Access Workflows

  • Charles Hosale, WGBH
  • Leslie Bourgeois, Louisiana Public Broadcasting
  • Ann Wilkens, Wisconsin Public Television
  • Rachel Curtis,Library of Congres

The American Archive of Public Broadcasting seeks to preserve and make accessible significant historical public media content, and to coordinate a national effort to save at-risk public media recordings. In the four years since WGBH and the Library of Congress began stewardship of the project, significant steps have been taken towards accomplishing these goals. The effort has inspired workflows that function constructively, beginning with preservation at local stations and building to national accessibility on the AAPB. Archivists from two contributing public broadcasters will present their institutions’ local preservation and access workflows. Representatives from WGBH and the Library of Congress will discuss collaborating with contributors and the AAPB’s digital preservation and access workflows. By sharing their institutions’ roles and how collaborators participate, the speakers will present a full picture of the AAPB’s constructive inter-institutional work. Attendees will gain knowledge of practical workflows that facilitate both local and national AV preservation and access.

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Preservation is Painless: A Guide to Outsourced AV Digitization Project Management

  • Biz Maher Gallo, George Blood Audio/Video/Film/Data
  • Robin Pike, University of Maryland Libraries
  • Emily Vinson, University of Houston Libraries
  • Rebecca Holte, New York Public Library
  • Charles Hosale,WGBH Media Library & Archives
  • Erica Titkemeyer, UNC Chapel Hill Libraries
  • Kimbery Tarr, New York University Libraries

As an increasing number of audiovisual formats become obsolete and the available hours remaining on deteriorating playback machines decrease, it is essential for institutions to digitize their AV holdings to ensure long-term preservation and access. With an estimated hundreds of millions of items to digitize, it is impractical, even impossible, that institutions would be able to perform all of this work in-house before time runs out.  While this can seem like a daunting process, why learn the hard way when you can benefit from the experiences of others? From those embarking on their first outsourced AV digitization project to those who have completed successful projects but are looking for ways to refine and scale up their process, everyone has something to learn from these speakers about managing AV digitization projects from start to finish.

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Copy-it-Right: Historicizing and Preserving Video Processing Tools

  • Molly Fair, University of Richmond
  • Lauren Sorenson, UCLA
  • Mona Jimenez, NYU
  • Joey Heinen, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
  • Kathy High,Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
  • Carolyn Tennant, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

This panel aims to examine the histories and topics explored in the seminal new book, The Emergence of Video Processing Tools: Television Becoming Unglued. Panelists will discuss the multifaceted issues of preserving video works and image processing tools, methods for documentation, and how conservators and preservationists can benefit from exploring the relationship between technological histories and do-it-yourself culture. Video artists in both analog and digital modes of production have a rich tradition of technological innovation and invention. In concert with engineers, artists historically have pioneered video processing tools to alter and manipulate video signals in order to create complex works. The panelists will discuss how to best document and pass along the knowledge of artists/engineers, and whether it is feasible or integral to maintain the function of the original video processing tools.

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Nontheatrical Film & Race: Recent Archival-Scholarly Collaborations

  • Allyson Nadia Field, University of Chicago
  • Walter Forsberg, National Museum of African American History and Culture
  • Marsha Gordon, North Carolina State University
  • Martin L. Johnson,The Catholic University of America
  • Todd Wiener, UCLA Film & Television Archive

In this panel archivists and scholars present recent collaborative work surrounding nontheatrical film and race. As models for future projects, emphasis is on strategies for successful archival-scholarly collaboration. Martin Johnson will present on the archival strategies of three collections of African American filmmakers from the 20s and 30s, Walter Forsberg will discuss the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s Hortense Beveridge collection, Todd Wiener will present on the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project and the preservation efforts around a film about an African American trans woman in mid-1960s Los Angeles, and Marsha Gordon will discuss student films made at USC in the 60s and 70s about race in Los Angeles.

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AV Archiving in the Cultural Heritage Sector: Defining Core Competencies

  • Edward Benoit, III, School of Library and Information Science, Louisiana State University
  • Karen F. Gracy, School of Information, Kent State University
  • Janet Ceja, School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College
  • Snowden Becker,Department of Information Studies, UCLA
  • Adam Schutzman, School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College

Archives that hold A/V materials are at a critical point, with many cultural heritage institutions needing to take immediate action to safeguard at-risk media formats before the content they contain is lost forever. Yet, many in the cultural heritage communities do not have sufficient education and training in how to handle the special needs that A/V archive materials present. In the summer of 2015, a handful of archive educators ​and students ​formed a pan-institutional group to help foster “educational opportunities in audiovisual archiving for those engaged in the cultural heritage sector.” The AV Competency Framework Working Group ​is developing a set of competencies for audiovisual archive training of students in graduate level education programs and in continuing education settings. In this panel, core members of the working group will discuss the main goals of the project and the progress that has been made on it thus far.

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Get ‘Em While They’re Young: We Save 2 Film Workshop Overview

  • Elena Rossi-Snook, The New York Public Library
  • Alex Whelan, Pratt Institute Libraries

In the Fall of 2017, the AMIA Film Advocacy Task Force in collaboration with The New York Public Library produced a three-day film workshop designed to engage middle-school children in a consideration of motion pictures as an academic exercise, as a science and technology,  as a tactile art-making enterprise and as an archival medium.  The goal was to inspire young people from diverse socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds at a critical time in their development to think about careers in film-associated fields which are, at this point, challenged by a lack of diversity and inclusion while also serving formal curricular goals in Science Technology Engineering Art Mathematics (S.T.E.A.M.).  Come find out how the workshop went and offer input on how to modify the structure and curriculum so that it can be reproduced in a variety of locations throughout the U.S.

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Making for Audiovisual Archives

  • John Passmore, New York Public Radio

In this presentation, archivist John Passmore will talk about his experiences applying maker technologies to workflows specific to audiovisual archiving and preservation. Archivists will learn how to plan, design, and build a maker-type project using available knowledge bases. John will cover how to procure materials, produce and test parts, and leverage knowledge bases from standards bodies, maker communities, hobbyists, and other archivists. This is panel is appropriate for enthusiastic beginners and experienced archivists alike.

 

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