AMIA 2022 Program

 

AMIA 2022 | December 7-9 | Pittsburgh

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

10:00AM – 5:00PM
AMIA/DLF Hack Day (Registration required)

Hack Day is a unique opportunities for practitioners and managers of digital audiovisual collections to join with digital library 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 collections management needs.

10:30AM – 5:00PM
Community Archiving Workshop (Registration required)

The Community Archiving Workshop (CAW) is an opportunity for conference attendees to engage with the community of Pittsburgh by working with local volunteers and helping an organization gain intellectual and physical control over an endangered moving image collection. Through the CAW, we partner with local volunteers to inventory and inspect of a collection of film, video, and/or audio. In the process, attendees learn how to identify formats and their risk factors, and what information is needed for priority-setting and preservation planning. We gain experience in working with non-archivists who care about a collection, and who often know its history and can imagine its potential. Most importantly, we build relationships and connections with the Pittsburgh community and learn about local history. This year, a cohort of members and friends of AMIA are learning to become CAW organizers through the CAW Training of Trainers curriculum. Stay tuned for more information about their partner and the location.

 

 

 

 

 

8:45AM – 9:15AM
Coffee & Tea Break

9:15AM – 10:30AM
Keynote & Opening Welcome
Keynote Speaker: Rick Sebak

  • Rachael Stoeltje, AMIA President

Welcome to AMIA 2022!

Keynote speaker Rick Sebak is a Pittsburgh institution. His light documentaries celebrate various aspects of modern American life and the unexpected charms of Pittsburgh. Audiences have learned to recognize his friendly narrative style and the unusual topics that he obviously loves. Since 1987 when he returned to his hometown of Pittsburgh to work at WQED, he has produced more than 25 documentaries about the history, the neighborhoods, the buildings, the people and the food of western Pennsylvania.

9:30AM – 10:30AM
Virtual Meeting: Accessibility Committee
See conference app for Zoom link

11:00AM – 12:00PM
Video Digitization: An Overview on Best Practices and Equipment

  • Matthew Patoray, Iron Mountain Entertainment Services
  • Matt Steck, Iron Mountain Entertainment Services

Digitization and common misconceptions  on how to digitize assets and best practices to preserve the highest quality video.  The panel will also offer a demonstration of a U-matic tape and EIAJ Tape Digitization and equipment.

11:00AM – 12:00PM
Increasing Equity in the Field Through Preservation Fellowships and Training

  • Teague Schneiter, AMIA Pathways/Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
  • CK Ming, AMIA Pathways/Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture
  • Rebecca Fraimow, GBH
  • Dimitrios Latsis, University of Alabama
  • Morgan Oscar Morel, BAVC Media

Representatives from WGBH’s Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship (PBPF) and the associated EBSCO Scholarships at University of Alabama, AMIA’s Pathways Fellowship Program (Pathways), and BAVC Media’s Community-based Preservation Education and Training program (CPET) will discus their programs’ efforts to increase equity in the field by providing training and hands-on experience, focusing on individuals from under-resourced and underrepresented communities. Panelists will give an update on implementation and evolution of these fellowships and educational opportunities over the last two years, due to new funding sources (IMLS, NEH etc), the needs of applicants, COVID restrictions, participant feedback and cultural shifts within the field and beyond.  They will also discuss efforts to cross-pollinate knowledge between programs, for example creating learning opportunities and community-building for participants across cohorts. The panel will also discuss the key issue of developing ongoing fundraising sources to support these programs as well as the individuals receiving direct benefit from them.

11:30AM – 12:00PM
Inside the Seattle Art Museum’s Historic Media Collection

  • Mia Ferm, Seattle Art Museum

The Seattle Art Museum’s Historic Media Collection documents the almost 90-year history of the encyclopedic art museum through film, video, and audio materials. From interviews with artists and curators, to informal gallery tours, staff oral histories and celebrations, unedited marketing reels, news broadcasts, installation documentation, and more, this unique collection reveals the story of an art institution beyond its permanent art collection. Established through a three-year grant funded project to digitize, preserve, and provide access, this presentation from the Collection’s Project Manager (and lone archivist at SAM), will introduce attendees to the collection, take stock at the project’s half-way point, and consider how materials like this can support arts and museology research as additional primary sources.

12:00PM – 1:00PM
Meeting: Open Source Committee

12:00PM – 1:00PM
Roundtable: Moving Image Related Materials

  • Mary Huelsbeck

A discussion about related materials  (props, costumes, posters, etc) and whether there is interest in forming/reforming a committee to address common practices and challenges.

12:30PM – 1:30PM
Tour: University of Pittsburgh Archives & Special Collections

  • Miriam Meislik, University of Pittsburgh Archives & Special Collections
  • Ben Rubin, University of Pittsburgh Archives & Special Collections

The tour will include highlights from the George A. Romero Archival Collection. Directions to the archive will be sent prior to the conference.

1:00PM – 2:00PM
Meeting: PBCore Advisory Subcommittee

1:15PM – 2:30PM (Harris Theatre)
Screening: Experimental Curator: The Sally Dixon Story

  • Brigid Maher, Filmmaker

A documentary that delves into the life of experimental film curator Sally Dixon. Her story began in the 1960’s when she received a small hand-held movie camera from her father-in-law and started making films, that she later called “Film Poems.” Sally is known as a trailblazer in the “film as art” movement and created the film program at The Carnegie Museum of Art in 1970. She founded the program with the purpose of “promoting a greater understanding and appreciation of film as an art form and the filmmaker as an artist.” It was one of the first museum-based film programs in the country. The film ultilized the Walker Archives, CMOA and Sally’s personal archives. There were 54 rolls of never before seen super 8 film from her personal connection.

2:00PM – 3:00PM
Calling All CAWs!: The CAW Training of Trainers (TOT) Project

  • Moriah Castillo Ulinskas, Community Archiving Workshop
  • Sandra Yates, Community Archiving Workshop
  • Amy Sloper, Community Archiving Workshop
  • Kelli Hix, Community Archiving Workshop
  • Pamela Vadakan, Community Archiving Workshop

In 2018 Community Archiving Workshop received an award from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to scale its established workshop model to a “Training of Trainers” (TOT). The TOT project trains librarians and community leaders to organize and implement CAWs in their communities and to become trainers themselves, passing the workshop model on to peer organizations with audiovisual collections. In 2020 CAW received a supplement from IMLS to switch to a remote model in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Partners participated in webinars, received training kits and digitization and film inspection kits, inspected and inventoried a collection with remote guidance from a CAW mentor and developed a preservation plan. CAW members will share the outcomes of both the original trainings and the resources developed through the switch to remote training, with an emphasis on recruiting attendees to participate in a TOT and become trainers themselves.

2:00PM – 3:00PM
Black Films Project at the Library of Congress

  • Mike Mashon, Library of Congress
  • Maya Cade, Black Film Archive
  • Andrea Leigh, Library of Congress

Race films as a group are widely defined as films released between the end of WWI and the early 1950s, produced and distributed by Black companies, written, directed, and starring Black talent, and typically exhibited in theaters located in Black neighborhoods. The Library of Congress is engaging in a sustained, multi-year effort to preserve, describe, celebrate, and make widely available the more than one hundred race films in our collection along with other fiction and non-fiction films produced primarily by and for Black audiences. This panel will describe different aspects of the project, including the cultural and historical importance of these films (Maya Cade), the incorporation of inclusive description cataloging practices (Andrea Leigh), and plans to make these films available online through the National Screening Room (Mike Mashon).

2:00PM – 3:00PM
Animation is a Team Sport: Successes and Challenges of Archiving Animation

  • Anna Lynn E Martino, Nickelodeon Animation
  • Melissa Woods, Pixar Animation Studios
  • Liz Borges Herzog, LAIKA

Have you ever been curious about archiving animation? Anna Martino from Nickelodeon Animation Archives and Library, Melissa Woods from Pixar Animation Studio, and Liz Borges Herzog from LAIKA, will discuss the history and evolution of their respective collections. In addition, they will share their approaches to the challenges of managing their evolving collections.

2:30PM – 3:00PM (Harris Theatre)
Screening: What Was Left Behind

  • Lauren Caddick, Filmmaker

A dozen years after her father’s sudden divorce from her mother, Lauren Caddick discovered a collection of family home videos. Reexamining a buried past through adult eyes, the footage raised fresh questions:  When exactly did everything go wrong? How evident was the impact on her, her mother, and her two younger sisters? And what secrets do parents keep from us — for better or for worse? Told through this home video footage and letters between Lauren and her father, What Was Left Behind is a voyeuristic lens into the fracturing of a family, the complexity of memory, and the ramifications of choices we make.

3:00PM – 3:30PM
Coffee & Tea Break

3:15PM – 3:45PM
A Report on the AMIA 2021 Demographic and Salary Survey

  • Brian Real, University of Kentucky

3:15PM – 4:15PM (Harris Theatre)
Screening: Rediscovering Pittsburgh Filmmakers: Films/Videos from the 1970s & 1980s

  • Steven Haines, Flea Market Films/Pittsburgh Sound + Image

This program features selections of independent, amateur, and/or experimental films produced by artists affiliated with Pittsburgh Filmmakers in the 1970s and 1980s. This screening has been curated by and will be introduced by Pittsburgh-based microcinema programmer and MLIS student Steven Haines, who has spent the last five years helping to bring back to the surface many neglected stories and works associated with Pittsburgh Filmmakers.

3:15PM – 4:15PM
The Copyright Claims Board: New Choices for Archives and Libraries

  • Patricia Aufderheide, American University
  • Jenni Matz, Academy of Television Arts and Sciences
  • Brandon Butler, University of Virginia
  • Kathleen Burke, Public Knowledge
  • Michael Madison, University of Pittsburgh

What does the new Copyright Claims Board, a non-judicial venue at the Copyright Office created in June 2022, for copyright disputes up to $30,000, mean for moving picture archivists? When should you consider using the global-opt-out feature, available for libraries and archives, of the CCB? Does the global-opt-out feature also cover archive employees? Can you use this new venue to challenge someone who has infringed against your copyright? What should you do if your archive or library hasn’t opted out, and someone complains to the CCB about your unlicensed use of copyrighted material? What do we know about who’s using it, and for what, from the first six months of the new Board’s existence? Bring your questions to this panel!

3:15PM – 4:15PM
Restoration or Distortion? Artificial Intelligence and Early Cinema

  • Hugo Ljungbäck, University of Chicago

Over the past three years, early films have seen new life through what has become known in common parlance as “artificial intelligence restoration”: early travelogues and scenics are upscaled to 4K at 60 fps, colorized, and sound is added to make these historical images come alive in the present. While most of us might want to dismiss them as part of a short-lived, contemporary fad, the views they continue to accrue evidence sustained interest in these “restored” films. How can we, as archivists and scholars: reckon with these “remastered” films, which challenge basic terminology and best practices in the field; engage with and respond to the discourses they generate about preservation and the moving image as historical index; and harness the interest in archival film these clips have generated for our own preservation and pedagogical efforts?

4:30PM – 5:00PM
Media Ecology Project NEH Grants Report: Early Cinema; Accessible Civil Rights

  • Mark Williams, Dartmouth College
  • John Bell, Dartmouth College

This panel will consist of two Report Presentations that address key research outcomes and lessons learned regarding two major NEH grants received by Mark Williams and John Bell for The Media Ecology Project (MEP): “Understanding Visual Culture Through Silent Film Collections”, which will produce an online Early Cinema Compendium, and “The Accessible Civil Rights Heritage (ACRH) Project”, which will produce an online resource for research on over 8,000 rare civil rights media assets from archives across the U.S. plus guidelines for annotating archival footage for access by blind and low-vision viewers.    We have also been developing a cut detection tool especially trained for use on older archival moving image materials. Together, these tools support close textual analysis of moving pictures based on time-based annotations. The integration of MEP tools with the publication platform Scalar advances scholarship and pedagogy for 21st century visual culture studies.

4:30PM – 5:00PM
Don’t Get Crushed: Riding the Mobile Video Tidal Wave

  • Mick Reed, Clippn, MiMojo

The revolution in mobile video is already here in both production and consumption due to its ubiquity, quality, and connectivity. Sony’s CEO for Semiconductor Solutions, Terushi Shimizu, predicts that by 2024 “smartphone cameras will be superior to SLRs”. But how can you avoid getting crushed by the oncoming tidal wave of footage? This session will demonstrate the opportunities and challenges that mobile video presents for archivists with practical steps to take that will:  – increase productivity  – boost speed-to-market  – make archives more transparent and accessible   – and grow usage and ROI.

4:30PM – 5:30PM (Harris Theatre
The Moving Image Presents: In Search of Bigfoot: Recovering George A. Romero’s Jacaranda Joe

  • Devin Orgeron, The Moving Image
  • Adam Hart, Media Burn
  • Ben Rubin, University of Pittsburgh

A small panel will discuss and screen George  Romero’s recently recovered proto-found-footage  short film, JACARANDA JOE (1994). Along with  an overview of the George A. Romero Collection  at Pitt, the panel will situate this seldom-seen  Bigfoot film within Romero’s career more broadly.  This screening coincides with a feature article in  THE MOVING IMAGE.

4:30PM – 5:30PM
Collaborative Partnerships for Preserving Magnetic Media

  • Guadalupe Martinez, BAVC Media
  • Willow Germs, California Revealed
  • Bernie Schlager, Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies, Pacific School of Religion

This past year, BAVC Media, California Revealed, and The Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in Religion (CLGS) at Pacific School of Religion collaborated to digitize a portion of the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) collection held by CLGS. The Metropolitan Community Church is an international LGBTQ-affirming Protestant Christian denomination. The collection includes many audiovisual materials, many of which are magnetic media, documenting congregational services, conferences, trainings, meetings, and activism. BAVC Media facilitated a fellowship program to train in digitization through a partnership with California Revealed (CA-R). California Revealed is a California State Library initiative that helps digitize California’s cultural heritage from archives, libraries, museums, historical societies, and more. California Revealed partnered with BAVC Media’s Fellowship program to digitize VHS, Betacam, 3/4” U-Matic, audiocassettes, and 1/4” reel-to-reel tapes, in various conditions. The set of recordings we will be discussing include titles such as “Undying erotic friendship: Foundations for sexual ethics” and “Building a multi-racial, multi-ethnic church”. You will hear from Willow Germs from California Revealed (CA-R), Dr. Bernie Schlager from CLGS/Pacific School of Religion, and BAVC Media’s Preservation Fellow, Guadalupe Martinez. The panel discussion affirms the urgency in digitizing and preserving magnetic media formats while presenting the complexity of the MCC collection. This collaboration was facilitated by BAVC’s Preservation Fellowship program, and we plan to describe the benefits this program had for the personnel and collections involved.

5:00PM – 5:30PM
Making African Academic Resources Accessible (MAARA) – Nine Years On

  • Judith Opoku-Boateng, University of Ghana

The Making African Academic Resources Accessible (MAARA) Project, an audio preservation collaborative project between the Audiovisual Preservation Exchanges (APEX) at NYU and the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, which took off in 2014 has yielded many positive  and interesting results, worth sharing.  The project aimed at training staff of the Institute’s archive to physically preserve and digitise its endangered audio assets deposited on quarter inch open reels to make them accessible to support academic research and creative engagement.  Since the commencement of the project, thousands of hours of digital audio files have been generated and made accessible to the university community for application.  Beyond the academic accessibility of the files, the MAARA has created a model for audio preservation in the region.  Several training projects and mentorship projects have emerged. These positive results are worth sharing, as a greater part of the project partners are members of AMIA.

5:00PM – 5:30PM
Queer Radio with Attitude: Digitizing Houston’s LGBT History

  • Emily Vinson, University of Houston
  • Bethany Scott, University of Houston

In 2020, UH Libraries was awarded an NEH grant to digitize and make accessible 40 years of Houston’s LGBT radio and television history. Decades before issues like trans visibility or intersectionality entered the mainstream, these TV and particularly radio programs provided a platform for marginalized voices. In this presentation, we will describe the collections and highlight the unique opportunities and challenges presented by a large-scale, post-custodial AV archive from an underrepresented community. In particular, this presentation will discuss strategies for creating transcriptions for over 3,200 hours of content to ensure accessibility and improve discoverability of these unique recordings.

6:00PM – 7:00PM
Opening Night Cocktails

It’s opening night in Pittsburgh!  A chance to raise a glass, say hello to friends, and meet new colleagues in person before heading out for trivia, or dinner, or other fun.

7:30PM – 9:00PM
Trivia Night

  • Colleen Simpson, Prasad Corporation

Test your skills, win prizes, and dethrone the reigning AMIA Trivia Champs! Do you know the food that Alfred Hitchcock feared? Or what the official bird of Redondo Beach, CA is? If not, maybe one of your teammates does.  Sign up to play as a team or on your own or show up and we’ll assign one for you.  Eight rounds – and prizes for Best Team Name, Best Team Cheer, and, of course, the champion team!

 

 

 

 

 

8:30AM – 9:30AM
Roundtable: Mentorship in AMIA

  • Ashley Fransk-McGill, AMIA Mentorship Pilot Project Manager
  • Danielle Townsend, AMIA Pathways Mentorship Coordinator

Bring your coffee (or tea) and join us for a discussionn about mentorship!  Have you ever been a mentor or considered being a mentor?   We believe that the mentor/mentee relationship is mutually enriching and that mentorship – formal or informal – is critical to an inclusive profession. You can be a mentor at any stage in your career. This roundtable is to discuss mentorship – what it means, how to inspire new mentors, and what resources new mentors might need in order to feel capable and confident in this new role. Facilitated by Ashley Franks-McGill, program manager of the 2022 Mentorship Pilot and Danielle Townsend, mentorship coordinator for the AMIA Pathways Fellowship, the roundtable will start with a short (five minute) overview of AMIA’s pilot project this year.

9:00AM – 10:00AM
Coffee & Tea Break

9:00AM – 5:30PM
The Pavilion

Don’t miss an opportunity to visit the Pavilion! The Pavilion brings together exhibitors with demos, skill shares, and “ask an expert” spaces.    Our goal is to create a hub for sharing information at the conference.

Today’s highlights include –

  • Chat with NEH’s Josh Sternfeld about #PresAccessFunded grants: $10K-$350K to preserve or provide access to your humanities collection! Sign up for a 15-minute talk on Thursday or Friday in the Pavilion: bit.ly/TalkwithNEH22. 
  • There will be a Resume Review table in the Pavilion on Thursday. Volunteers will be available for 1-2 hour shifts, and will review as many resumes as they are able in that time frame.
  • AMIA Screening Room: Watch a Conversation with Caroline Rubens of Appalshop as well as Visions 2032 series videos while you are charging  you phone at the charging stations in Booth 9 and 10. Thanks to our friends at PRO-TEK!

9:00AM – 5:30PM
The Raffle – Two Ways

Raffle time! This year it’s a raffle two ways. You can buy a ticket the old fashioned way (tickets are 3/$5) or you can visit an exhibitor in the Pavilion. Each exhibitor has a number of tickets – stop by the booth say hello and get a ticket. No purchase (or even a promise to purchase) required. Just stop to say hello.

Grand Prize is a registration + two nights at the conference hotel in 2023. First and second prize are a 55″ LG HD/UHD Television. They’re are on display in the Pavilion. There’s also a Davinci Resolve Studio license from Black Magic Design.

9:30AM – 10:30AM
Balancing Act(ion): Navigating Restoration and Preservation Challenges in NMAAHC’s Recent Archival Projects

  • CK Ming, Smithsonian NMAAHC
  • Ina Diane Archer, Smithsonian-NMAAHC

Since 2015 The National Museum of African American History & Cultures Time-Based Media team (TBMA) has conducted a robust preservation and restoration program. NMAAHC has won several National Film Preservation Foundation grants and other funding support to restore and preserve items in its collections both digitally and on their original media. But how do we balance restoration and preservation of items without the input of the original creators or the unique opportunities and issues when there is an opportunity to consult with living filmmakers and creative stakeholders? What is the fine line between preservation and total restoration? NMAAHC will present several case studies from completed and ongoing projects and discuss how the TBMA team works to maintain both the original object and how it was intended to be viewed. The team will also discuss challenges in discovering original elements and best copies to work from when beginning a project.

9:30AM – 10:30AM
DV Rescue: the Community Speaks

  • Libby Savage Hopfauf, MIPoPS/Seattle Municipal Archives
  • Dave Rice, CUNY/RiceCapades

Since 2019, MIPoPS and RiceCapades has worked on the NEH funded DVRescue project, developing the procedures, tools and documentation to assist audiovisual archivists with preserving their DV videotapes. Through this work, we have developed, tested and modified a variety of tools and documentation that encompass a set of best practices we recommend to the greater archival community for all aspects of DV videotape preservation, including capturing, troubleshooting, analyzing, and quality control. The DVRescue team will provide some updates on the project and demonstrate the latest builds. Members of the archival community participating in the DVRescue project will describe their experience and practical application of the tools.

10:00AM – 11:00AM
Global Perspectives

  • Rachael Stoeltje, Indiana University
  • Chalida Uabumrungjit, Director of Thai Film Archive
  • Débora Butruce, President of Brazilian Association of Audiovisual Preservation (ABPA)
  • Aboubakar Sanogo, Carleton University

Speakers representing Thailand, Brazil and the African and Afro-diasporic film heritage will join us to share archival perspectives of the issues happening in these areas of the world. They will discuss how archiving might be approached differently, what kind of challenges are ongoing, or simply what the key areas of focus are in other parts of the world.Specifically, topics of discussion will include a presentation on the crisis that affected the Cinemateca Brasileira, one of the most important archives in Latin America, that has brought special national and international attention to the Brazilian audiovisual heritage. In this panel, Débora Butruce, the current president of Brazilian Association of Audiovisual Preservation (ABPA), will provide an overview on the practical challenges faced by institutions and preservationists in Brazil, as well the problematic situation of never being able to fulfill the parameters of audiovisual archiving established in the Global North. Additionally, we will have a presentation on where and who is preserving African cinematic heritage and the implications of this sometimes lost heritage and how this impacts our global cinematic shared history. And last the Director of the Thai Film Archive will speak about the most prevalent issues facing archives in South East Asia and what the largest challenges and accomplishments have been at the Thai Film Archive over the past few decades.

11:00AM – 12:00PM
Automating Direct Digital Transfers: Technology, Collaboration and Challenges

  • Laura Drake Davis, Library of Congress
  • Jim Duran, Vanderbilt University

Many institutions are turning to cloud-based storage as a long-term storage solution. However, the move to cloud storage can disrupt long-standing workflows – requiring new workflows to be developed to adapt to new storage strategies.  In this session, Jim Duran, Director of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive (VTNA), and Laura Drake Davis, a Digital Project Specialist at the Library of Congress National Audio Visual Conservation Center (NAVCC), will discuss the impact of a shift in digital storage strategy on a long-standing preservation file transfer workflow. Focusing on the secure automated workflow used to transfer files using cloud technology, without servers or digital asset management software, managing stakeholder expectations, and lessons learned, participants from organizations of all sizes will be able to learn about elements that can be applied in their institution.

11:00AM – 12:00PM
The Challenges of Digitization and Digital Preservation in an Unstable Context: the Brazilian Experience

  • Débora Butruce, Brazilian Association of Audiovisual Preservation (ABPA)
  • Ines Aisengart Menezes, Witness

Brazilian audiovisual heritage can be depicted as an area of constant instability, as evidenced by the recent administration and management crisis of institutions run by the Brazilian government and the work evasion due to professional vulnerability. Furthermore, the low and unstable investments, usually centered in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, make it even more challenging for institutions in other regions of the continental country. The context of instability makes digital preservation a Herculean duty, as noticed by the difficulty of accessing collections in audiovisual institutions and the absence of a grander number of Brazilian films from the past on streaming platforms. The proposal is to debate how local instability affects digital access initiatives and what are the possible regional and sustainable solutions in the short, medium and long term.

11:00AM – 12:00PM
Missing Movies and Finding Films:  Identifying and Navigating the Challenges

  • Dennis Doros, Milestone Films /Missing Movies
  • Elias Savada, Motion Picture Information Service
  • Maya Cade, Black Film Archive
  • Dave Filippi, Wexner Center for the Arts

Our community faces many challenges identifying, finding, preserving, restoring, and publishing “lost” films that may not have had distribution or festival exposure — including independent media made by women and members of BIPOC, LGBTQ, and/or disabled communities. Moderated by Dennis Doros, co-president of Missing Movies, the panel will consist of: filmmaker Nancy Savoca will discuss her experiences trying to track down the rights and materials for her award-winning features; copyright expert Elias Savada will clarify the legal and procedural barriers; Dave Filipi of the Wexner Center of the Arts will address the challenges of locating lost films and clearing rights to screen them; and Maya Cade, founder of the Black Film Archive, will explore how films have historically been ignored and neglected — and as a result are difficult to identify, locate, and preserve.

12:00PM – 1:00PM
Meeting: Nitrate Committee

12:00PM – 1:00PM
Meeting: Conference Committee

12:00PM – 1:00PM
Meeting: Publications Committee

12:00PM – 1:00PM
Meeting: Education Committee

12:00PM – 1:00PM
Meeting: AMIA Preservation Committee

12:00PM – 2:00PM
Poster Session

  • 100 Most Influential Film Preservation Projects/Restorations
    Oscar Becher, Vinegar Syndrome, NYUWith arguably the most famous film list (BFI’s Sight & Sound) once more being voted on by the world’s filmmakers, film critics and scholars, the question arises; what of the archivist’s role in telling the story of the moving image? This poster will outline the difficulties, potential benefits and intricacies of creating a film list voted on by film and moving image archivists for the purposes of raising awareness for film restoration and preservation. Through focussing on the history of film restoration and preservation in a simplified format this presentation will hopefully get AMIA attendants thinking about motion picture listology within the era of the online database and the role of the archivist within it. After being provided with examples from different archival institutions, attendants can vote on film restorations which they deem worthy of inclusion.
  • Assessing Community-Based Audiovisual Archives
    Khalila Chaar-Pérez, People’s Media Record
    Helyx Horwitz, People’s Media RecordOur poster will present and analyze a series of key findings from the Philadelphia Audiovisual Collections Evaluation (PACE): a needs assessment project centered on collections of community-based audiovisual materials in Philadelphia. Carried out throughout 2022 by the People’s Media Record in collaboration with two other community media organizations, PACE has the goal of learning what other community audiovisual collections exist in Philadelphia and what their preservation practices are like. In examining the results from this project, our poster considers how community-based audiovisual archives and collections struggle with long-term preservation. As the first study of its kind, our project will hopefully generate a set of lessons that will be widely applicable to other community-based media archives. By contextualizing our analysis in current discussions about the potential liberatory work of community archives, our poster ultimately seeks to jumpstart conversations about how to support community-based media preservation in ways that are truly equitable and sustainable.
  • Enter the robot! A case study in optical media migration
    Andrew Weaver, University of Washington LibrariesOptical media, particularly CD-Rs and DVD-Rs, represents a looming preservation crisis at many organizations due to its heavy use for such a long period of time to store both digitized and born-digital media. In an attempt to address this risk to our collection, during 2022 the University of Washington Libraries investigated and implemented a disc ripping robot based workflow that has exponentially increased our capacity to preserve these materials.    This poster presents the results of this project, including workflow steps, metadata considerations, detail around the software and tools considered, the pitfalls encountered during testing and the tools ultimately selected. These include a slightly modified version of the IROMLAB tool for DVDs as well as a unique in-house designed open-source based tool for CDs that we found can solve many shortcomings found in commercial options. Links are provided to online tools and documentation to aid others considering this type of project.
  • Unearthing Moving Image Instances of Student Protests in Production Elements
    Matthew Wilcox, Michigan State University Libraries
    Historical filmed recordings of demonstrations may live on reels of production elements.  However, film can labels and film leader descriptors may not always provide all the information about the moving image content on its related reel.  But when instances such as these are discovered, they may greatly benefit researchers.  By creating separate records for these instances in digital repositories, and providing value-added descriptors, emphasis can be placed (and instances are made more accessible) on these moments in history that might have otherwise gone unnoticed to present-day researchers.

1:00PM – 2:00PM
Meeting: Small Gauge and Amateur Film Committee

1:00PM – 2:00PM
Meeting: LGBT Committee

1:00PM – 2:00PM
Meeting: News, Documentary, Television Committee and Local TV Task Force

2:00PM – 3:00PM
Restoring the Sara Gómez Documentaries at the Vulnerable Media Lab

  • Susan Lord, Queen’s University
  • Rebecca Gordon, Queen’s University/Toronto Metropolitan University
  • Michelle O’Halloran, Queen’s University
  • Jennifer Norton, Queen’s University
  • Brandon Hocura, Queen’s University

Sara Gómez was an Afro-Cuban filmmaker who died in 1974 at age 31, leaving behind nineteen documentaries, a feature film, and an image of utopia. Currently, the Vulnerable Media Lab is restoring Gómez’s extant documentaries using DIAMANT software. Though her life was short, Gómez left a deep impact on the formation of the Cuban film institute; on ethnographic and autoethnographic filmmaking practice; and on political discourses of race, gender, and revolution. Since her death, her films were in the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) film archives. Many elements were lost or destroyed by mold and other forms of neglect that stem from an under-resourced national archive and by the politics surrounding Sara’s legacy as an Afro-descendant and feminist filmmaker. Our panel examines the practical restoration processes we have developed, as well as metadata and documentation that are attentive to emerging protocols of postcustodial archival practices.

2:00PM – 3:00PM
Anywhere and Everywhere: Practical Advice for DIY Tape Digitization

  • Chris Nicols, XFR Collective
  • Caroline Gil, XFR Collective
  • Marie Lascu, XFR Collective

XFR Collective members discuss designing and implementing digitization stations in the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in Lower Manhattan,  the office space of Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) in Hell’s Kitchen, the Children’s Art Carnival in Harlem, large institutions like the New York City Municipal Archives and other spaces like apartments, bars and even former underwear factories. For almost ten years, XFR has supported the idea that tape digitization doesn’t always need to be conducted under ideal circumstances, archival principles can be adapted, and Doing It Yourself often means figuring out how to Make It Work. This panel will also explore questions such as: Does ‘preservation level’ fit the reality of every archiving scenario? Is Vrecord capture software better in some environments than others? Where on Earth can you find a TBC these days? Are physical scopes essential? What does ‘forever’ even mean? Join us to hear what happens when theory meets practice.

2:00PM – 3:00PM
Oral Histories Capturing Knowledge About Changing and Obsolete Technologies

  • Hope O’Keeffe, Library of Congress
  • Melissa Dollman, Tribesourcing Southwest Film Project/ Deserted Films
  • Jackie Jay, Farallon Archival Consulting
  • James Snyder, Library of Congress National Audio Visual Conservation Center

The field of audiovisual archiving and preservation has experienced tremendous technological change over the last thirty years. Institutions face significant challenges maintaining and repairing obsolete equipment and finding individuals with specialized technical knowledge.  AMIA’s Capturing Changing Technologies in Oral Interviews project includes trainings for oral histories on changing technologies and a series of oral histories conducted by and of AMIA members and other practitioners. By preserving anecdotal knowledge and personal experiences of those in the audiovisual archiving community through oral histories, the Capturing Changing Technologies project assures that technical knowledge that has historically been excluded from our cultural heritage can finally be captured. The panel will include project manager Melissa Dollman and participating interviewers and practitioners discussing the issues of working with changing and obsolete technologies; the oral history process as a tool for capturing expertise and best practices; and paths forward as technologies continue to evolve.

3:00PM – 2:00PM
Meeting: Oral History Committee

3:00PM – 3:30PM
Coffee & Tea & Cookies

3:15PM – 4:15PM
De-Mystifying LTO, or, LTO for the Masses

  • Linda Tadic, Digital Bedrock
  • Larry Blake, Swelltone
  • Reto Kromer, AV Preservation by reto.ch

LTO data tape is an economical and physically robust storage media option for archives with digital content. Its open file system, LTFS, is not reliant upon propriety software. As a result, it enables accessing individual files as if the they were on a hard drive.  LTO can be used with single desktop drives, in small changers, or in large-scale robotic systems. This session will de-mystify using LTO data tape for archival data storage. The panelists will review the storage technology, and provide considerations in using LTO: drives, software, hardware, workflow when migrating to newer LTO generations, and open-source tools. The core part of the session will outline the components in building a streamlined and portable LTO system that can be used by anyone.

3:15PM – 4:15PM
Community Cataloging with the South Side Home Movie Project

  • Justin D Williams, South Side Home Movie Project
  • Nick Adam, Span Studio

Since 2018, the South Side Home Movie Project has offered community cataloging workshops, in which small groups of local residents gather to view home movies together and “crowdsource” catalog data. Like our regular public screenings, where the comments called out by audience members, these events are very helpful in our efforts to research the contents of the films, these sessions provide essential context not available from other sources. At this session, SSHMP will introduce to the AMIA community to new interactive features on our recently redesigned website (www.sshmp.uchicago.edu) that will allow for users to create and share “community tags” and “memories.” These features will allow users of all kinds to immerse themselves directly in our descriptive practices as full partners. We will present on the collaborative design process that led to the development of these features and also invite attendees to demo them live during this session.

3:15PM – 4:15PM
Universal Music Archive and the Restoration of Guns N’ Roses

  • Tim Knapp, PRO-TEK Vaults
  • Jason Zito, Universal Music Archive

The session will be an interview with focus on the restoration of the May 16, 1991 Guns N’ Roses Concert filmed on 16mm and 35mm film in New York City.  This title is the summation of two years of work on developing the archive master plan for short and long form content. The importance of the current and future work on the entire UMG Archive will be highlighted and this includes the archive best practice approach to their extensive music archive. The interview will include still photos and video imaging throughout the presentation. This session be in both pre-recorded and live Q&A’s.

4:30PM – 5:00PM
How Lossless is Lossless

  • Dave Rice, CUNY

Lossless encodings for audiovisual data offer a number of efficiencies over uncompressed variants but use more complex methods to gain those efficiencies. This presentation shall provide a tour of how one lossless encoding works: FFV1, which was standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force in 2021. The tour will include approachable demonstrations of quantization, range coding, median prediction and other techniques of the design of FFV1 that can reduce the use of scarce resources such as digital storage and bandwidth.

4:30PM – 5:00PM
Performing the Archive: Digital Spaces & Folkstreams

  • Tom Davenport, Folkstreams
  • Kaitlyn Kinney, Folkstreams

Folkstreams is a free streaming website for films featuring documentary films on American traditional culture. Film Comment Magazine describes Folkstreams as “an oddball gold mine of music documentaries, ethnographic films, and educational movies with little-to-no commercial appeal”. Folkstreams “performs the archive” with the idea that without an audience, a film is like a tree falling in the forest that no one hears. While the collection has a physical archive in the Southern Folklife Collection of the University of North Carolina, the Folkstreams website also functions as a digital archive. Folkstreams accompany the films with curation and background articles that few archives have the time or expertise to develop. Tom Davenport (Project Director) and Kaitlyn Kinney (Folklorist) will present on the Folkstreams model hoping to share their experience with other special interest archives. And, they seek to connect on strategies and methods of raising the visibility of film archives.

4:30PM – 5:30PM
The AMIA Pathways Fellowship: Meet the Fellows

  • CK Ming, Pathways Advisory Board Chair
  • Teague Schneiter, Pathways Project Director
  • Danielle Townsend, Pathways Mentorship Coordinator
  • Lorena Ramirez-Lopez, Pathways Curriculum Coordinator
  • Larissa Nez, Pathways Fellow
  • Sherley Torres, Pathways Fellow
  • Lupe Jacobson, Pathways Fellow
  • Ami Townson, Pathways Fellow
  • Leila Sherbini, Pathways Fellow
  • Camryn Johnson, Pathways Fellow
  • Lily Lubin, Pathways Fellow
  • Veronica Franco, Pathways Fellow

The AMIA Fellowship supports paid internships in combination with mentorship and professional development training to forge pathways in the audiovisual preservation field for people from groups historically underrepresented in the profession. The Fellowship welcomed the 2022 cohort in June and this is an opportunity to meet the Fellows and hear a bit about their internship experiences.

5:00PM – 5:30PM
Is 4K OK?

  • George Blood, George Blood LP

Advances in technology have brought film scanners capable of resolutions of 4K and higher. But what about the films being scanned? Different stocks and gauges have higher and lower resolutions. The cost of storage continues to fall, but the long-term cost of storage and the carbon footprint of files needs to be considered. If we’re scanning at a higher resolution than contained within the source, we are imposing unnecessary costs on future generations. This presentation looks at the science of resolution along the entire production lifecycle of motion picture film, providing the information necessary to make informed decisions on how to deploy your bits, storage and carbon budget with the highest impact.

5:00PM – 5:30PM
Report on the First Year of Home Movie Days in Iceland

  • Sigridur Regina Sigurthorsdottir, Iceland Home Movie Collective / University of Iceland / Living Art Museum / Skjaldborg
  • Kamilla Gylfadottir, Iceland Home Movie Collective / Skaftfell / Skjaldborg

In its first year, the Iceland Home Movie Collective has held four Home Movie Days around Iceland. These were held in the capital of Reykjavík, as well as three small towns with populations ranging from 500 to 1200. Each home movie day was organised around a different event or circumstance and presented unique views into the local culture and history of the areas. This presentation will give insight into the development and results of these events, outline the lessons learned, discuss the cultural and historical specifics revealed and screen some notable clips from home movies.

5:30PM – 6:30PM
Grab a drink in the Pavilion!

Before you head out to Archival Screening Night, grab a drink with the Pavilion exhibitors.  Check your registration envelope for a drink ticket.

5:45PM – 6:45PM
Meeting: Advancement Committee

7:00PM – 9:30PM
Archival Screening Night

Archival Screening Night is a showcase for AMIA members’ recent acquisitions, discoveries and preservation efforts.  The program represents the magnificent spectrum of media formats, works, and collections protected and preserved by the AMIA community.

 

 

 

 

8:45AM – 9:30AM
Keynote: A Conversation With The Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre (Recorded)

  • Rachael Stoeltje, AMIA President
  • Oleksander Teliuk, Head of the Dovzhenko National Centre Archive Department

There is a lot of discussion in the archives field about disasters that affect our collections, our work, and the loss of our histories—and within our professional organizations we work to prepare for these disasters and plan accordingly. In the past eight months the Oleksandr Dovzhenko Center in Ukraine has been faced with two monumental disasters that no one could have foreseen and are difficult for many of us to imagine. Mr. Oleksandr Teliuk, Head of the Archive at the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre and AMIA President Rachael Stoeltje discuss the situation at the Centre and what we all can do to help.

9:00AM – 10:00AM
Coffee & Tea Break

9:00AM – 2:00PM
The Pavilion

Don’t miss an opportunity to visit the Pavilion! The Pavilion brings together exhibitors with demos, skill shares, “ask an expert” spaces, and small group discussions.  Check the app for an updated list of demos, and topics. Our goal is to create a hub for sharing information at the conference.

9:45AM – 10:15AM
Hack Day Awards

  • Annie Schweikert, Stanford University

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.  Today we’ll review their work and hear the results of some of these collaborations.

9:45AM – 10:45AM
Film Cleaning: Further Research from the AMIA Preservation Committee

  • Julia Mettenleiter, Swedish Film Institute
  • Anne Gant, Eye Filmmuseum
  • Caroline Figueroa Fuentes, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin/ Ethnological Museum of Berlin
  • Susan Etheridge, Packard Humanities Institute, UCLA
  • Kieron Webb, British Film Institute
  • Elena Nepoti, British Film Institute

Keeping film clean is one of the most basic actions of film preservation. Practices may differ between small collections and large preservation labs, but for the most part it is assumed that cleaning happens as a key component of good archival practice. Perhaps because it is so integral, it is not widely discussed. However, the techniques, solvents, and workflows employed merit a closer look.     The AMIA Preservation Committee Film Cleaning Workgroup conducted a survey in 2021 to get a sense of the broad practice of film cleaning.  The survey revealed three key areas of concern for organizations, which will be addressed during this session:     •             Health, safety, and ecological issues, including types of cleaning products and practices for protecting the user and the environment  • Knowledge sharing, including workflows and best practices  • Machine maintenance, including daily upkeep and long-term upkeep     You are invited to bring your questions and concerns to this panel.

9:45AM – 10:45AM
Invaders from Mars – A Nightmare of Restoration

  • Scott MacQueen, Ignite Films b.v.

Invaders from Mars (1953) was photographed in Eastmancolor 5248 color negative with release printing in SUPERcineCOLOR, a complex process using duplicate Y-C-M printing negatives and dye-mordant toning. The Camera Negative lacks titles and opticals. 18;00 of cuts were made in 1954 for a Continental version that also added new footage. 60;00 of the lost OCN was found in Hollywood stock film library in 2012 and provided the foundation for the restoration. The missing 18was sourced from old, worn release prints acquired from Australia , Rochester NY , and Hollywood CA. Audio from all composite sources was transferred, compared and edited for best signal quality After adjusted for levels the assembly was denoised. In all, the restoration consulted five different 35mm sources. Final delivery was made as MXF files.

11:00AM – 12:00PM
Airtable Archives Show & Tell

  • Brendan Coates, Computer History Museum
  • Morgan Morel, BAVC Media
  • Kelley Coyne, BAVC
  • Brianna Toth, Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Film Archive
  • Tani Nakamoto, Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Film Archive
  • Frances Harrell, Myriad Consulting

Move over spreadsheets, there’s a new(-ish) sheriff of data management in town: Airtable!     Many archivists and administrators have begun implementing Airtable for all sorts of uses, from tracking archival objects to workflow management, to internal documentation.     In this panel, some users will share their creative implementations of Airtable. Panelists have leveraged the relational database aspects of the platform, along with various automation tools and a python API to create highly configurable and automatable data management systems.      This session is meant to educate the audience on both the benefits and the weaknesses of Airtable. It’s not meant to be a sales pitch, or to evangelize or shill for the platform.  Panelists will share their pain points, known issues, ignored feature requests, and potential future problems, as well as their solutions to all of these. We hope to give the audience a good launching point for starting their own Airtable adventure!

11:00AM – 12:00PM
This Is How We Do It: An Archival Sustainability Case Study at the University of Illinois

  • Jimi Jones, University Of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  • Karin Hodgin Jones, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  • Robyn Bianconi, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

This panel will feature several professionals from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who will discuss how the digital asset management practices at the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning (CITL), a high-throughput video production unit, help to minimize its “e-waste footprint.” CITL employs a system called the Curricular Asset Warehouse (CAW), that uses several open-source software tools to be an all-in-one production, cataloging, preservation and discovery tool. Key to this session is a case study of the CAW system, to determine if it is an effective strategy for minimizing CITL’s digital storage needs and, by extension, the amount of electronic waste produced by the department.      Rather than just being a theoretical discussion about how archives and repositories can do better with respect to sustainability and access to digital objects, this session will give participants real-world solutions that they can implement in their institutions.

11:00AM – 12:00PM
The 6K Restoration of Orson Welles’ Chimes At Midnight: The Restoration Process, Its Problems and Solutions

  • Michael Dawson, Cinedustrial
  • Gregory Gantner, Cinedustrial
  • Scott Fritz, Standed On A Planet Inc.

Our presentation session focuses on the 6K restoration of Orson Welles’ Chimes At Midnight.  We will describe all the technical tools utilized in the restoration process and how we came to acquire the film elements.  It will include a history of the film and how the misuse of elements brought about negative criticism. The trailer is here: https://vimeo.com/518344579/8ece69f3a6

12:00PM – 1:00PM
Meeting: Projection and Technical Presentation Committee

12:00PM – 1:00PM
Roundtable: Transcoding Born-Digital Camera Original Files for Preservation

  • Rebecca Fraimow, WGBH
  • Crystal Sanchez, Smithsonian

What features would you like to see in tools to help archivists handle born-digital camera original files? This discussion will focus on developing a community of interest, wish lists and use cases.

12:00PM – 2:00PM
Poster Session

  • Adolf Nichtenhauser: Documenting the History of Movies and Medicine
    Sarah Eilers, National Library of Medicine
    Danielle Calle, National Library of MedicineThe Adolf Nichtenhauser: Documenting the History of Movies and Medicine poster session aims to activate interest in the life and work of medical film historian, Adolf Nichtenhasuer (1903-1953), whose 1950 book manuscript, A History of Motion Pictures in Medicine, was left unpublished at the time of his death. This important work argued for the  interconnected prehistories of cinema and modern medicine—designed by “men whose desire to understand physiology of movement had stimulated the invention of the motion picture.” This poster session will present highlights of the content in this collection, and we welcome all emerging and established scholars interested in the histories of science, medicine, and moving images.
  • Archival as Survival: Preserving Forgotten Stories through Community-led Archives
    C Díaz, ENTRE Film Center & Regional Archive
    Andres Sanchez, ENTRE Film Center & Regional ArchiveENTRE is an artist-run community film center and regional archive located in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, a border region that has repeatedly been deprived of resources to document its history and tell its own stories to the world. Noticing the limited documentation of region-specific geographical and cultural stories, ENTRE launched two long-term, community-led archival projects. One focuses on the rapidly shifting environmental concerns surrounding Boca Chica Beach, and the other on the story of Conjunto, a waning genre of music that originates within working-class communities of the RGV. In this poster session, ENTRE will outline the goals and collaborators for each project, along with the vision for each collection. Through the archival of home movies, photographs, and oral histories from these communities, ENTRE’s work will fill historical knowledge gaps and return ownership of these stories to the people of the Rio Grande Valley.
  • DIY Public Broadcasting Preservation with the PBPF Fellows
    Rebecca Fraimow, GBH
    Michelle Witt, UNC Libraries
    Kaitlin Howard, University of Missouri
    Patrice Prevost, Clayton State University
    Kimo Nichols, University of Hawai’iThe Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellows are graduate students representing library and archive programs around the country that do not have a specialization in audiovisual preservation, but have provided an opportunity for students to gain expertise in this area via the PBPF Fellowship. In this poster session, the Fellows will share their real-world experiences in pursuing small-scale DIY preservation projects at a variety of institutions in different areas of the country with distinct technical setups and preservation needs. The presentation will focus on commonalities, differences, and challenges across the Fellowship projects.
  • Taking Stock: Providing Access to an Architecture Museum’s Audiovisual Collection
    Nina Patterson, Canadian Centre for ArchitectureThis poster explores the workflow of creating a full list of the audiovisual holdings at the Canadian Centre for Architecture with the goal of giving more access to these holdings.  This project touches on went into the process, the challenges, and the outcomes. It also delves into how partnerships with other institutions are a tool for disseminating content with not only researchers, but the wider public. This presentation provides some examples from the collection and explains the criteria that was used for selecting items for digitization. Finally, there is a brief section on what could have been done differently and what resources are needed for a project of this scope.
  • What I’ve Learned: Film Digitization as a Fellow
    Tuesday Sweeney, University of Colorado BoulderMy name is Tuesday Sweeney and I am a senior at the University of Colorado Boulder majoring in Art History. I am a Media Archiving and Preservation Fellow in the University Libraries’ Digital Media Services specializing in film digitization. During my fellowship, I helped digitize 30 negative films from the Dark Circle collection; the films depict protests in the 1970s-80s surrounding nuclear production near Boulder, Colorado. I have learned a lot, not only about film digitization and digital preservation, but the history of my home state as well. My poster will be exploring the workflow, what the Dark Circle collection is, and my biggest takeaways.

2:00PM – 3:00PM
Conserving South Asian Cinema Collections in North American Archives

  • Lydia Creech, George Eastman Museum
  • Erica Jones, George Eastman Museum
  • Amal Ahmed
  • Brian Meacham, Yale Film Archive

This panel discusses three different South Asian Cinema Collections housed at the George Eastman Museum (GEM) and Yale Film Archive. The GEM’s “Sheikh Taimoor Collection” has 400 Pakistani titles, produced between 1950 -1980. This unique and valuable collection represents the zenith of production before political changes in Pakistan shuttered the film industry. Yale Film Archive has a large collection of Indian home movies on small gauge reversal from the 1960-1970s. GEM also has a collection of 775 Indian feature film prints from 1995 – 2013, representing the last decade of 35mm film production and distribution. Amal Ahmed, recent NYU MIAP graduate, joins the archivists of these collections to begin conversations emphasizing issues of ethics, global digital access, identification, as well as the urgent need for preservation. This panel is designed for archivists and scholars who are interested in open dialogues to preserve, promote, and make accessible material that speaks beyond borders.

2:00PM – 3:00PM
AMIA Projects & Open Forum

An opportunity to hear about current projects and an open forum for discussion.

2:00PM – 3:00PM
Behind Blue Eyes: Covert NYPD Surveillance of Political Activism

  • Chris Nicols, NYC Department of Records

During the 1960s and 70s, undercover NYPD officers from the Bureau of Special Services (BOSS) recorded hundreds of political actions by groups and individuals that they deemed potentially dangerous to public safety. After acquisition by the Municipal Archives in 2015 and digitization through 2019, all 1,450 16mm silent surveillance films are now available online. This screening will show roughly 45 minutes of these films, featuring Vietnam War protests, Civil Rights demonstrations, Puerto Rican cultural events, police brutality protests, Gay Liberation after Stonewall, UN protests about Taiwan and Palestine, Pope Paul VI and US Presidents Kennedy, Nixon and Johnson. All of these subjects were surveilled without their knowledge or consent, but many of the films presented in this screening record moments of incredible bravery and joy among marginalized communities. Hear how the collection was acquired and the reactions to its public release.

3:00PM – 3:30PM
Coffee, Tea & Snacks

3:15PM – 3:45PM
Envisioning the Future of Audiovisual Preservation in India

  • Sreya Chatterjee, University of Applied Sciences, Berlin
  • Anne Gant, Eye Filmmuseum

The making of films and their preservation are fundamentally different deeds. The state of audiovisual preservation of India, despite being one of the largest producers of films, is not only a glaring example of this incongruity but also a curious coexistence of challenges and opportunities. The lack of financial and logistical resources, and skilled personnel have been aggravated by India’s unfolding political situation, in which the notion of both heritage and conservation are jeopardized, along with collective identity, multicultural coexistence, and freedom of expression. However, despite rampant privatizations and mergers, adversely affecting state-owned audiovisual archives, emergent non-profit initiatives are reshaping the future of audiovisual preservation through interdisciplinary collaborations, global outreach, academic cognizance and specialized trainings. The transition is slow but evident, and in the need of constant persuasion, especially through a new generation of archivists, who would aspire to change the paradigm of audiovisual conservation in India sustainably and strategically.

3:15PM – 3:45PM
“Hey mom, look what I can do”: Performing “Film Reconstructions” with Undergraduate Students

  • Ben Harry, BYU — Special Collections

Film restoration projects have often been cost-prohibitive for small archives, but with affordable and powerful new technology and tools, it is now becoming much easier to perform such projects. Creating a ‘Film Restoration Internship’ for undergraduate students has allowed us to walk a new generation of students through the photochemical workflow, reconstructing productions from original elements and learning archival and curatorial practice hands-on. From initial element identification and preparation through public presentation this unique program has been successful. Come hear the report on the characteristics of how we are doing this, challenges we have faced, and some plans for the future.

3:15PM – 4:15PM
Resurrecting the 1970s Guerrilla Television Movement

  • Dan Erdman, Media Burn Archive
  • Adam Hart, Media Burn Archive
  • Daniel Morgan, University of Chicago
  • Julie Gustafson, independent producer

The works of the independent video boom of the 1970s are at special risk for loss and destruction. Both tapes and playback machines are swiftly decaying, and lack of access to the material compounds the difficulty of advocating for its preservation. To address this situation, Media Burn Archive and the University of Chicago have embarked on an ambitious plan to digitize the thousands of un-transferred tapes of this era, and provide access to them via a new web portal. This initiative, Resurrecting the 1970s Guerrilla Television Movement, has been underway for a year, and panelists will discuss their strategies and the challenges of working to save this important material. Julie Gustafson, a videomaker from that era who, thanks to this project, has now been able to see her own footage for the first time in decades, will also speak about her experiences in the earliest days of tape.

3:45PM – 4:15PM
GYN on Super 8: Accessing Reproductive Health Information

  • Louisa Trott, University of Tennessee

Until it was forced to close in July 2022, the Knoxville Center for Reproductive Health was using a 1970s’ Fisher Price Super 8 film viewer – the “OMNI Health Communicator” – as an effective way to provide crucial healthcare information to women. According to the nurse practitioner, it was more effective than digital video. The clinic had two viewers and eight cassettes, with titles including Breast Self-Exam, How to use Vaginal Applicators, and Diaphragm Insertion.    This presentation explores the materiality of film and, through sensory engagement with interactive technology, its ability to provide a stimulating learning experience in the 21st century; contextual information about the filmmakers, OMNI Education, a Division of Ortho Pharmaceutical Corporation, a company with a long history in women’s healthcare; and discussion of specific considerations for the preservation and access to both the films and artifacts.  The audience will have the opportunity to handle the artifacts at the presentation.

3:45PM – 4:15PM
Developing Undergraduate Learning Objectives in Media Archiving and Preservation

  • Jamie Marie Wagner, University of Colorado Boulder

This session reflects on the process of developing undergraduate Student Learning Objectives in Media Archiving and Preservation at the University of Colorado Boulder, a 3-year project supported by a 21st Century Librarian Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Beginning with a broad, comparative survey of MLIS, archiving, and film preservation curricula, this session will consider the current landscape of audiovisual education, the usefulness of professional competencies as a framework in archiving and information professions, and the potential for traditional graduate-level education to be adapted to an undergraduate audience. What aspects of media archiving and preservation training are useful to undergraduate students in film studies and media production? What benefits might there be to expanding archival training opportunities to undergraduate students in regional universities? How might student success and impact be measured in meaningful ways?

4:30PM – 5:30PM
Screening: The Pursuit of Happiness (1983)

  • Sara Chapman, Media Burn Archive
  • Julie Gustafson,

An exploration of the Declaration of Independence’s most ambiguous “self-evident truth” through portraits of six people whose paths intersect at a local maximum security prison. Neglected for many years, this work has been made available again through the Resurrecting the 1970s Guerrilla Television Project, an initiative by Media Burn Archive and the University of Chicago to digitize and put online the remaining undigitized independent video works of that era. This 1983 documentary video was shot in Pittsburgh, and includes footage of the area in and around the city. In addition to being an important visual record of the city’s recent history, it also focuses on a segment of the region’s population that’s not often depicted in its visual media.    Sara Chapman (Media Burn Archive) will introduce the piece, and Julie Gustafson, producer of The Pursuit of Happiness, will speak briefly about her memories of the production.

4:30PM – 5:30PM
American Archive of Public Broadcasting: Managing Risk for Access

  • Karen Cariani, GBH
  • Jay Fialkov, GBH
  • Hope O’Keeffe, Library of Congress
  • Alan Gevinson, Library of Congress

The American Archive of Public Broadcasting will provide a transparent view into how we’ve made available online more than 90,000 digitized public television and radio programs through a robust rights review policy, with zero take-down notices since the 2015 launch. The panel will share practical and legal challenges and lessons learned in order to make matereials as broadly accessible as possible. Panelists will share solutions and strategies for promoting access to digital materials while limiting legal risk through 1) developing a framework for conducting rights assessment with limited resources and attorney time, including an institutional “Bucket Policy” for providing access in an Online Reading Room (ORR), 2) providing limited access to remote researchers for content not available in the ORR, 3) creation of online exhibits that have been shown to motivate copyright holders to grant permissions, and 4) developing template forms with standard terms to maximize use and access.

4:30PM – 12:00AM
Virtual Bench: An Experimental Application of Artificial Intelligence for Archivists

  • Diana Little, The Media Preserve
  • Greg Wilsbacher, University of South Carolina
  • Tommy Aschenbach, Colorlab

Virtual Bench is an NEH-funded research project that will develop a novel method for viewing digital surrogates of motion picture films and deploy the capabilities of artificial intelligence to detect physical characteristics such as splices and edge code information. This open-source project combines the work of film archivists with computer vision and high-performance computing scientists. To introduce this project to the AMIA community, Greg Wilsbacher will provide an overview of the project’s goals and design, with an emphasis on the deep learning tasks being developed. Tommy Aschenbach will discuss the overall structure of the Virtual Bench player application under development. Attendees will learn about the possibilities and challenges of analyzing the materiality of film as a light-sensitive strip (and not just a series of image frames) and have an opportunity to ask questions about the project and provide input at the early stages of the project.

6:00PM – 7:00PM
Closing Night at AMIA 2022

A chance to say goodbye to colleagues and grab a drink before heading out to enjoy your last night in Pittsburgh.

 

Thank you to our partners and sponsors
for their support of AMIA and the conference.

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