AMIA 2023 Program

To mark the 20th anniversary of the AMIA Small Gauge Symposium (2001) and the centennials for 9.5mm and 16mm film, the Small Gauge and Amateur Film Committee is excited to host a celebratory symposium as part of the 2023 annual AMIA conference. More about the Symposium and its program is here. Sessions marked SGS are part of the Symposium programming.

On Friday afternoon, a series of sessions will focus on communities under fire, intended to highlight and give voice to the work of archives and community activists ensuring the histories of these communities are collected and preserved.

• Download the Program (PDF)
• The Program on Sched

9:00 AM – 5:00 PM | Separate Registration Required
The Art of Small Gauge Projector Maintenance and Repair
Louisa Trott, University of Tennessee
Dino Everett, USCA HMH Foundation Moving Image Archive
Skip Elsheimer, A/V Geeks
Kristin Lipska, Prelinger Archives
Jennifer Miko, Prelinger Archives
Seth Mitter, Canyon Cinema

The Small Gauge and Amateur Film Committee hosts a full-day pre-conference workshop on small gauge projector maintenance and repair. The workshop will cover an array of 16mm, 8mm, and Super 8 projector models and their repair and maintenance protocol. Attendees will have the chance to work hands-on with the playback machinery and will leave with the knowledge of how to care for the projectors needed to view their archival film. Our thanks to Boston Light & Sound for their generous support in making the workshop possible.

9:00 AM – 5:00 PM | Separate Registration Required
Audiovisual & Preservation Technology Basics for Non-Engineers
James Snyder

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

9:00 AM – 5:00 PM | Separate Registration Required
PBCore Training Workshop: Day I
Rebecca Fraimow, GBH

This PBCore training workshop is for archivists, media collection managers, production professionals, and anyone else interested in best practices for managing metadata around audiovisual collections. The workshop will provide extensive hands-on training with PBCore and the existing suite of PBCore tools, as well as offering attendees the opportunity to bring real-world cataloging problems and use cases to the workshop for discussion.  The first day of the workshop will is a full day and the second day (Wednesday) will comprise two sessions. Thanks to a generous grant from NEH, the workshops are offered free of charge.

6 PM – 7:00 PM
AMIA 2023 Opening Night Cocktails

It’s opening night in Tulsa!  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. Don’t forget to try a Dupli-tini – a drink created for AMIA 2023 from our friends at Duplitech (the signature glasses are first come/first serve!).

7:30 PM – 9:30 PM
Trivia Night 2023
Trivia Master: Colleen Simpson, Prasad Corp/DFT

Test your skills, win prizes, and dethrone the reigning AMIA Trivia Champs! Do you what language passes for Nien Nunb’s alien language in Return of the Jedi? Or what the state fruit of Delaware is? If not, maybe one of your teammates does.  Play as a team 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!

8:45 AM – 9:15 AM
Coffee & Tea Break

9:00 AM – 10:30 AM
AMIA 2023 Welcome & Keynote Speaker: Dr. Raymond Doswell

Welcome to AMIA 2023 and our Keynote Speaker, Dr. Raymond Doswell. Raymond Doswell is a seasoned public historian, educator, and museum executive with close to 30 years of experience. He has worked collaboratively with regional and national entities such as museums, filmmakers, governmental organizations, public museums, manufacturers, colleges, and schools, advising and directing projects on history and culture. This work includes managing and advising the development of permanent and traveling history exhibitions. He has also traveled extensively as a public speaker on topics of African American history. Doswell served as Vice-President of Curatorial Services at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, where he managed exhibitions, archives, and educational programs, from 1995-2022. He was appointed Executive Director of the Greenwood Rising Black Wall Street History Center in January 2023.

11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better
George Blood, George Blood Audio/Video/Film/Data

Why does the output from high end film scanners look so different from each other? Like so much else in life, designing a scanning system entails both setting priorities and managing the impact of those choices on other parameters. This paper will explain the relative merits of various components of the imaging systems used to digitize film, including line vs full frame, collimated vs diffuse light, single vs multiple flash, and others. Side-by-side images from respected film scanners will be shown, using calibrated film sources.

11:00 AM – 11:30 AM
Let’s Play: The Pleasure and Pain of Videogames Presentation
Patrick McIntyre, National Film and Sound Archive of Australia

Many archives and museums around the world are grappling with the rapid growth of video games as a dominant entertainment and cultural form. The challenges are numerous and complex, from the technological to the industrial and cultural.     In 2019, the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) began pro-actively collecting games alongside film, television, music, radio and other audiovisual forms. Working in collaboration with games developers, industry bodies and peer cultural institutions, it has pioneered new ways of understanding games as a cultural form, and how the history of games can be preserved.     This presentation will look at NFSA’s early approaches to the challenges of videogames preservation, share observations about emerging practice, and examine how the missions of cultural institutions must constantly evolve along with the audiences and industries they serve.

11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Preserving Appalachian Culture: Recovery and Remediation of Appalshop’s Legacy Media Content
Alisha Perdue, Iron Mountain Entertainment Services
Caroline Rubens, Appalshop Archive
Kelly Pribble, Iron Mountain Entertainment Services

Appalshop will discuss how the flood devastated their extensive archival collection of audio recordings, videos, photographs and artwork that document history and life in the Appalachian Mountains and Iron Mountain Entertainment Services (IMES) will explain how they are restoring and remediating a portion of the affected audio and visual assets.  Iron Mountain’s Living Legacy Initiative is supporting Appalshop with a charitable grant in their recovery, including storage and remediation services.  Learn about Appalshop’s extensive archive and the challenges of protecting collections in the face of climate change, as well as gain expert advice to minimize risk to your own collections.

11:00 AM – 2:00 PM | Separate Registration Required
PBCore Training Workshop: Day II

This PBCore training workshop is for archivists, media collection managers, production professionals, and anyone else interested in best practices for managing metadata around audiovisual collections. The workshop will provide extensive hands-on training with PBCore and the existing suite of PBCore tools, as well as offering attendees the opportunity to bring real-world cataloging problems and use cases to the workshop for discussion.  The first day of the workshop will is a full day and the second day (Wednesday) will comprise two sessions. Thanks to a generous grant from NEH, the workshops are offered free of charge.

11:30 AM – 12:00 PM
Evaluating Virtual Machines for the Preservation of Video Games
Kirk Mudle, New York University

This preservation project investigates the use of virtual machines for the preservation of video games. From MoMA’s collection, Rand and Robyn Miller’s classic adventure game Myst (1993) is used as a sample record to evaluate the performance of four different emulation options for the Mac OS 9 operating system—SheepShaver, QEMU, Apple’s “Classic Environment,” and Yale’s University Library’s Emulation-as-a-Service-Infrastructure (EaaSI) platform. Serving as the control for the experiment, Myst is first documented running natively on an original PowerMac G4 and iMac G3 at MoMA. The native performance is then compared with each emulation software. Finally, a fully configured virtual machine is packaged as a single file and tested in different contemporary computing environments. More generally, this project clarifies the risks and challenges that arise when using virtual machines for the long-term preservation of computer and software-based art.

12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
Meeting: Small Gauge/Amateur Film Committee

12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
Meeting: Moving Image Related Materials and Documentation Committee

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

1:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Meeting: CAW Working Group

1:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Meeting: Open Source Committee

2:00 PM – 3:00 PM
SGS: Roundtable: Small Gauge and Amateur Film at 20
Hugo Ljungbäck, University of Chicago
Louisa Trott, University of Tennessee
Patricia Ledesma Villon, Walker Art Center

2021 marked the 20th anniversary of the Small Gauge Symposium, hosted by the Small Gauge Film Preservation Task Force at the 2001 AMIA conference. That symposium grew out of a focused effort by archivists, preservationists, researchers, and scholars to raise awareness of the cultural, historical, and artistic significance of small gauge and amateur film. It also provided a platform to actively address collection development and preservation issues relating to these formats. Much has happened since those initial meetings 20 years ago, and organizations across the world have emerged to support the study of small gauge and amateur film. As we celebrate two other anniversaries—the centenaries of 9.5mm (1922–2022) and 16mm film (1923–2023)—this seems an opportune moment to take stock of how the subfield of small gauge, amateur, and nontheatrical film has developed and advanced over the past few decades. Participants are invited and encouraged to share their own thoughts, reflections, and recollections of how we got here, and what we’ve achieved along the way.

2:00 PM – 2:30 PM
S-VHS for Archivists: Super, or just Supercilious?
Morgan Oscar Morel, Library of Congress

What’s the deal with Super VHS? It’s not faster than a locomotive, or able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, so what’s so “Super” about it? S-VHS is often misunderstood and misused in preservation contexts. This is due to the lack of technical resources on the topic geared specifically towards cultural heritage workers. This presentation will explain what Super VHS (S-VHS) is, how to identify it, and how to properly transmit and capture it in a preservation workflow. Participants will be equipped with the knowledge and skills needs to fight truth, justice and a better tomorrow (for magnetic tape media).

2:00 PM – 3:00 PM
A Decade of Preserving Public Media History
Karen Cariani, GBH
Rachel Curtis, Library of Congress
Miranda Villesvik, GBH

Staff from the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) will provide an update on their work over the past decade. The AAPB, which has received nearly $25,000,000 of investment from various organizations, including the Mellon Foundation, IMLS, NHPRC, NEH, and CLIR, has digitized over 150,000 historic public television and radio programs and original materials from stations, producers, and archives across the country. The staff will discuss their fellowship programs, curatorial work, and community outreach efforts, and research with Brandeis University on machine learning to make their archive more searchable and discoverable. Looking ahead, the AAPB has set ambitious goals of digitizing another 150,000 endangered programs from around the nation and doubling the size of the archive. The session promises to offer insights into the challenges and innovative solutions for archiving and preserving American public media history. Attendees can expect to deepen their understanding of this important work and its significance.

2:30 PM – 3:00 PM
Digitization Double Takes
Dave Rice, CUNY
Libby Hopfauf, MIPoPS

Historically, the videodeck plays and the computer records and a single recording is born. But what if … using a combination of techniques, such as deck control and multiple capture passes, the digitization is made from a series of complete and partial tape playbacks rather than just a single one? This presentation will examine situations where a multiple-pass approach to videotape digitization can provide a more accurate and complete result rather a singular one. The presenters will also review multiple projects, such as DVRescue and Digital Video Commander, which coordinate deck control and digitization with live assessment of the transfer to facilitate better transfer work.

3:00 PM – 3:30 PM
Coffee & Tea Break

3:15 PM – 4:15 PM
Maintenance Culture: Sustaining Access to Complex, Born-Digital Creative Works
Frances Harrell, Myriad Consulting & Training; Maintenance Culture
Emily Vinson, University of Houston
Yvette Ramirez, University of Michigan, Maintenance Culture contributor, Independent Archivist

Maintenance Culture—a National Endowment for the Humanities grant-funded project—was developed in response to the increasing volume of complex, born-digital objects within small and mid-sized collections; the rapid obsolescence of the technology they depend on; and the lack of practical, implementable guidance and curricula for institutions that may not have AV preservation specialists or new media conservators on staff.  Chaired by Myriad’s Executive Director, Frances Harrell, this panel address the complexities associated with preserving born-digital works of art (time-based media, software art, installation art, augmented reality works, etc.) and will introduce the Maintenance Culture Guidelines, which offer a flexible workflow for preserving complex, born-digital works. The session will also include presentations from Maintenace Culture collaborators, Libby Hopfauf and Emily Vinson. Representing the Pacific Northwest and Eastern Texas respectively, they will offer their distinct regional perspectives and will discuss how Maintenance Culture’s resources are implemented at their institutions.

3:15 PM – 4:15 PM
Building a Sustainable Initiative with the World’s Largest Museum Complex
Brianna Toth, Smithsonian Libraries and Archives
Walter Forsberg, AVMPI Curator of Audiovisual Media, Smithsonian Libraries and Archives
Alison Reppert Gerber, Preservation Coordinator + Head of AVMPI, Smithsonian Libraries and Archives

The Audiovisual Media Preservation Initiative (AVMPI) is the culmination of over 8 years of strategic planning, which began in 2015 with a pan-institutional survey of the Smithsonian’s audiovisual collections. The fruit of this labor has resulted in staffing a team of 6 who have been tasked with preserving and caring for at risk audiovisual materials across the Smithsonian’s libraries and archives. To do this, new agnostic workflows will be developed, digitization labs will be built, and existing digitization setups will be revamped, so that collections can be given greater visibility and access. Due to the scale of this undertaking and the diversity of the collections AVMPI will work with, nimble methodologies will be put into place. This panel will introduce the AVMPI team, provide the unique context of the initiative, discuss long-term goals, and present the work currently underway.

3:15 PM – 4:15 PM
Developing A Model for Intentional Growth: Community Archiving Workshop’s Strategic Planning Initiative Project
Kelli Hix, BAVC Media/CAW
Afsheen Nomai, KEXP Radio
Pamela Vadakan, California Revealed

Since its beginnings over a decade ago, the Community Archiving Workshop (CAW) has grown from an informal group of volunteers to a collective of A/V archivists collaborating with community partners to run national and international workshops and develop grassroots preservation tools. With support from funders including the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) and under the fiscal sponsorship of AMIA, the group has received over $780,000 in funds over the past five years. In August of 2022, CAW received support from the Mellon Foundation to review this rapid organic growth, survey other community-centered work in the field, and develop an intentional path forward through the creation of a strategic plan. In this session, CAW members will present the results of the year-long strategic planning initiative project and share their process and resources in support of other organizations interested in adapting collective working structures.

4:30 PM – 5:00 PM
Shining a New Light on the DVD
Nancy E. Friedland, Columbia University

Film and media collections in public and academic libraries were established in large part as a result of the home consumer video market. From videocassette to far superior optical disc formats, libraries over the past forty years have amassed exceptional collections representing our global cinematic and television history. These collections are more often treated as general circulating collections, and not treated to the practices of special collections that identify and preserve unique materials. However, these collections are increasingly representative of unique moving image titles, particularly in relation to the flux and challenges presented by streaming video. Shining a new light on the DVD format outlines how libraries should begin a process to reevaluate these collections as special unique titles and consider new practices for long term preservation and collaborative collecting initiatives.

4:30 PM – 5:30 PM
Iteratively Building a Film and Video Preservation Program
Katrina Windon, University of Arkansas
Mary Leverance, University of Arkansas
Emily Ward, University of Arkansas

Building a preservation program for film and video materials can be time- and resource- intensive, with administrators to convince along the way. Archivists and preservation librarians from the University of Arkansas will discuss their experience of iteratively building a preservation program that used existing and low-cost resources as proof-of-concept and interim tools while advocating for and building towards larger goals. Topics discussed include improvements to researcher-driven digitization workflows; collection storage; and collections management and inventorying.

4:30 PM – 5:30 PM
The Almost-Lost: Woody Guthrie, Steve Kahn, and the BPA Films
Libby Burke, Bonneville Power Administration Library

This session documents the circumstances that created then almost lost the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) film The Columbia. In 1941, the BPA Motion Picture Division’s Steve Kahn hired Woody Guthrie to compose songs for a yet-unwritten film about hydroelectric power and the Pacific Northwest, which included footage of migrants and depression-era jobs programs. Woody came up with 26 songs in 30 days—the  length of his government appointment. Kahn had footage from an earlier film, the Guthrie songs, some stock footage and half a screenplay. These components languished on the shelf for 7 years. “The Columbia” was completed in 1949 but largely ignored and ultimately destroyed, except for a few hidden prints. Over the years, a number of individuals, through perseverance and good fortune, brought this story of “26 Songs in 30 Days” to light. This presentation tells the whole story, and includes clips of Woody’s songs in the film.

5:00 PM – 5:30 PM
IIIF for AV: Introduction to the International Image Interoperability Framework
Jon W. Dunn, Indiana University Bloomington
Emily Lynema, Indiana University Bloomington

The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) is a set of open standards for delivering high-quality, attributed digital objects online at scale, developed and supported by an international consortium of leading cultural institutions. Originally created to support interoperability of still images from libraries, archives, museums, and other repositories, version 2 of the IIIF Presentation API now supports audio and moving image resources and collections. This session will introduce the IIIF Presentation API standard, discuss use cases from libraries, archives, and scholars that motivated its development, and demonstrate its support across multiple video players, annotation tools, and digital asset management platforms.

6:30 PM – 7:30 PM
SGS: Screening: Let the Emulsion Show : MIX NY LBGT Film Festival

In 1987, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman organized the MIX NY Film Festival, in response to experimental film venues in New York City not programming contemporary work made by LBGT filmmakers. Thirty-five years later, which of those personal films are currently accessible for exhibition, and in what format? If the original elements are housed in collections, are they on a path to preservation? Is it appropriate to assume that institutions that refused to program this work when it was created will now prioritize adding it to their current collection?

8:15 AM – 9:15 AM
Resignifying the moving image for inclusiveness in the Latinx community.
Fernanda Parrado, Celluloid

This session will explore the profound impact of colonization on film preservation in South America, focusing on the use of small gauge and amateur films as a means of resistance for people of color. By examining alternative tools used by the Latinx community, we will gain insights into how to amplify the voices of marginalized communities, fostering inclusivity in history and making heritage films more accessible to their own community.

9:00 AM – 10:00 AM
Coffee & Tea Break
Grab a cup of coffee or tea in the Pavilion. Thanks to our friends at PRO-TEK!

9:00 AM – 5:30 PM
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.

Highlights include –

Don’t miss an opportunity to visit the Pavilion! The Pavilion brings together exhibitors with posters, screenings, and other events. Our goal is to create a hub for sharing information at the conference.

Catch the Pavilion Screening: It’s Home Movie Day’s 20th anniversary! The Center for Home Movies reached out to hosts, archives and contributors from years past to put together a Happy Birthday clip show!

9:00 AM- 5:30 PM
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 2024. First prize is a 55″ Television. It is on display in the Pavilion (we have the box in case you need to ship it home). Second prize is a registration + workshop for AMIA 2024.

9:30 AM – 10:30 AM
Roundtable: Revisiting the Magnetic Media Crisis A Decade After the Library of Congress National Recording Preservation Plan

In 2012, the Library of Congress published its National Recording Preservation Plan, with the oft-quoted words:  “many analog audio recordings must be digitized within the next 15 to 20 years—before sound carrier degradation and the challenges of acquiring and maintaining playback equipment make the success of these efforts too expensive or unattainable.” In the decade since, archivists have been using these numbers to advocate for the preservation not only of audio material, but all magnetic recordings. This round table invites a discussion of the state of magnetic media preservation now that we are halfway through the estimated timeframe for preservation of some formats.     https://www.clir.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/pub156.pdf\

9:30 AM – 10:30 AM
SGS: Distributor Catalogs, Classroom Study Guides, and the History of 16mm
Gregory Waller, Indiana University
Madeline Webb-Mitchell, Indiana University (IULMIA)

As part of a year-long project at Indiana University marking the centenary of 16mm, the Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive has undertaken the digitization and online delivery of two unique collections of ephemeral documents: more than 300 catalogs representing both the broad spectrum of large and small libraries handling 16mm films and also the holdings of commercial non-theatrical distributors, corporations, and companies specializing in particular genres like religious films; and more than 6700 study guides for individual films from companies like Encyclopedia Britannica and Coronet explaining how teachers should most effectively deploy these films in the multimedia, mid-century classroom. This panel will provide an overview of these collections, which provide invaluable (and largely overlooked) information about the marketing, distribution, exhibition, and use of 16mm films when this format greatly expanded and reshaped the parameters and the uses of film in the U.S.

9:30 AM – 10:30 AM
Radar Love: Digitizing Radar Films For Ornithological Science
Rachel Del Gaudio
Andrew Farnsworth, Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology
Jessie Laudadio, George Blood LP

Along with changes in climate, migratory bird populations are under global threat with documented serious decline in diversity of the world’s birds. Thankfully, weather surveillance radar offers an amazing opportunity and methodology to monitor birds and their distributions in space and time. Used across the country beginning in the 1950s, the WSR-57 was the first ‘modern’ weather radar. The invention included a mounted motion picture film camera over the radar screen which documented blips as they moved across the display. The collection of these reels includes 16mm, 35mm, and unperforated 35mm from various weather stations. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology and George Blood LP are immersed in digitizing hundreds of these rolls of film that capture invaluable information for expanding knowledge of bird populations, understanding changes in climate, and doubling the temporal sampling of the atmosphere and its biology and meteorology.

9:30 AM – 10:30 AM
High-Definition Voyage: The HDV Migration Challenge
Jenni Matz, Television Academy Foundation
Nick Camardo, University of Southern California Digital Repository
Jossel Franco, Television Academy Foundation
Erica Titkemeyer, Myriad Consulting & Training, UNC-CH
Alan Auyeung, University of Southern California Digital Repository

This panel session delves into the technical challenges of migrating data from HDV videotape. Having a different format standard than MiniDV, many open-source toolsets geared towards capturing DV content are incompatible with HDV, leaving archivists to rely on unsupported, proprietary tools. This session will explore a case study of a large-scale video migration project carried out by the USC Digital Repository involving oral history interviews from the Television Academy Foundation captured in HDV. The Foundation’s Interviews collection includes 940 interviews spanning over 3,000 hours of cataloged and publicly accessible first-hand accounts of television industry pioneers and professionals. Representatives from USCDR and the Foundation will discuss the troubleshooting process, the solutions that were implemented, and the strategies that were considered to ensure the long-term preservation of the interviews.

11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
SGS: International Amateur Cinema: Histories, Archives, Metadata
Charles Tepperman, University of Calgary
Dan Streible, New York University
Simona Schneider, University of Udine
Dimitrios Latsis, University of Alabama
Maria Vinogradova, New York University

This panel builds on an ongoing international collaboration between film historians and archivists that sheds new light on amateur, small-gauge filmmaking practices around the globe. In particular, the panel traces points of international commonality and divergence, from common film themes and styles in amateur work, to linguistic differences of terminology, cataloging, and treatment of small gauge film stock. At issue here are the ways that amateur uses of small gauge film formats coalesced around common themes, but also fragmented into locally (geographically, linguistically, politically) different meanings. Through this project, film historians and archives are refining historical accounts and strategies for describing, cataloging and preserving amateur films.

11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
The AMIA Pathways Fellowship: Meet the 2023 Fellows
SHAN Wallace
Ani Kawada
Chris Carranza
Adira Philyaw
Christian Reeder
Ashley Tacheira
Aditi Prasad
Rhana Tabrizi
Connie Xuncax
Michelle Lin

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.

11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
The Restoration of Woody Woodpecker: Preserving Successive Exposure Animated Films
Jen O’Leary Hashida, NBCUniversal
Chase Schulte, NBCUniversal
Cassandra Moore, NBCUniversal

Among the most iconic of Universal Pictures animated characters is Woody Woodpecker, created by Walter Lantz Productions in 1940. One of the most unique legacy projects undertaken at NBCUniversal has been the DolbyVision Restoration and Preservation of Lantz Cartoons from the original 35mm successive exposure negatives.  Successive Exposure (SE) refers to the process in which animated material was filmed three times through individual red, blue, and green filters to produce three black-and-white film frames. Rather than use three-strip Technicolor to capture color images, the SE system utilizes a single strip of black and white film and places the three colors next to each other.  For NBCUniversal’s restoration, 139 episodes (133 safety film reels and 6 nitrate reels), approximately 7 minutes each, were scanned and digitally recombined. Chase Schulte, Jen Hashida and Cassandra Moore will discuss the importance of Lantz cartoons in the history of animation, and how the process unfolded.

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

12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
Meeting: AMIA Disaster Preparedness and Response Task Force

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

12:30 PM – 1:30 PM
SGS Screening: Home Movies as Microhistories
Patricia Ledesma Villon, Walker Art Center
Débora Butruce, Brazilian Association of Audiovisual Preservation
Daniel Melfi, Toronto Metropolitan University

This screening session brings together two presentations of home movies. Daniel Melfi will present films from the Don Vitalini fonds, preserved at Bologna’s L’Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia. The collection contains 65 8mm films shot by priest Don Cirillo Vitalini between 1959 and 1996, and Melfi examines what the films reveal about the social and cultural importance of home movies as recording and demonstrating developments in Italian society from the postwar period until the late 1980s. Débora Butruce of the Brazilian Association of Audiovisual Preservation (ABPA) will screen a selection of domestic and amateur films from different regions of Brazil recently digitized by Digitalização Viajante. The program presents a broad and rich panorama of records about different historical and cultural contexts in Brazil, and will be a unique opportunity to see these films, which have been historically neglected but must be reconsidered as an important cultural record worthy of preservation, research, and access.

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

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

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

2:00 PM – 3:00 PM
SGS: Preserving and Presenting Small Gauge Formats
Hugo Ljungbäck, University of Chicago
Kirk McDowell, George Eastman Museum
Andrew Watts, University of Calgary
Nicholas Caluda, Jefferson Parish Library

This panel brings together three presentations on small gauge formats and their unique challenges and possibilities for preservation and pedagogy. Based on archival research on a relatively unknown collection of 28mm films at the Library and Archives Canada, Andrew Watts explores the 28mm format through a media-archaeological lens to reflect on what its obsolescence can tell us about the ways film historiography is written today. Kirk McDowell looks at a collection of strange films at the George Eastman Museum, consisting of five-inch wide loops of diacetate film. The Vitalux format was briefly produced in the 1920s before the widespread acceptance of 16mm, and McDowell examines the provenance of the museum’s collection and addresses the challenges these films present for preservation efforts. Nicholas Caluda discusses how public libraries can collaborate with moving image archivists to help educate the public on the importance of small gauge formats and their present uses. Caluda offers models for programming and suggests how public libraries and archives can excite and engage their community members.

2:00 PM – 2:30 PM
Virtual Reading Rooms: Building the Legal Foundations
Greg Cram, The New York Public LIbrary

How can cultural heritage institutions use copyright to advance their missions? Virtual reading rooms provide remote, mediated access to digitized and born-digital archival materials held by cultural heritage institutions. They have the potential to widen access and provide a secure and mediated environment for using materials with copyright, privacy, or cultural protocol restrictions. This session presents a recently-released whitepaper that discusses the legal framework for The New York Public Library’s Virtual Reading Room program. Attendees will learn about NYPL’s approach to use the exceptions and limitations in copyright law to provide enhanced access to remote patrons of time-based media collections to further its mission to promote the progress of knowledge. Attendees will walk away with strategies to tailor their virtual reading room programs to align with their institution’s risk profile.

2:00 PM – 3:00 PM
More than News: A Survey of Locally Produced Television Programs
Karin Carlson-Snider, Northeast Historic Film
Karen Cariani, WGBH Media Library & Archives
Elizabeth Hansen, Texas Archive of the Moving Image
Kathleen Carter, Walter J. Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection, University of Georgia

When you were younger did you get up on Saturday morning to draw with Captain Bob, or rush home from school to watch Jabberwocky?  Have you ever been glued to a singing competition filled with contestants from your hometown or the local bowling finals?  Did you learn how to bake the perfect peach pie or mend torn pants from a local television program?  Programs like these, created and broadcast locally, give a regional perspective to national issues, provide a platform for some under-represented voices, and represent regional values and interests.  Archivists from Northeast Historic Film, WGBH, Texas Archive of the Moving Image, and Walter J. Brown Media Archives will discuss the importance of locally produced programs, review some challenges presented by this media, and screen some highlights from local TV collections across the country.

2:30 PM – 3:00 PM
Resolution Test Scans of 35mm Motion Picture Film in 4K, Super 4K and 8K

The session will focus on the optical reproduction of 35mm motion picture color film (and its limitations) and to demonstrate the technical opportunities of future digitization projects and content exploitation.  Technical scanning tests based on resolution charts (i. e. line pairs per mm) and real images (test scenes and real film scenes with actors) will be presented.  Tests will show two different scenarios: the first is a side-by-side comparison of native 8K versus native 4K film scans, the second comparing a native 4K scan to a Super 4K scan.  In the second scenario, Super 4K scans are scanned at native 8K resolution and downscaled to 4K resolution for storage and further processing. The quality achieved at Super 4K is in between a native 8K and a native 4K scan, offering an economic alternative to improve the quality of 4K images without having to extend storage capacity, network bandwidth, and other components in the downstream process.

3:00 PM – 3:30 PM
Coffee & Tea Break

Grab a cup of coffee or tea in the Pavilion. Thanks to our friends at DigiPres Labs!

3:15 PM – 4:15 PM
Roundtable: Nitrate Mad Libs: Implementing the Nitrate Film SOP At Your Institution

Attend the unveiling of the Nitrate Committee’s POLICY AND PROCEDURES FOR THE SAFE STORAGE, HANDLING, TRANSPORT, AND PROJECTION OF CELLULOSE NITRATE FILM template. The thorough document cites regulations, details best practices, and provides reference material for all things nitrate film. Give feedback and learn how to easily alter the document to meet your institution’s needs.

3:15 PM – 3:45 PM
SGS: These Are Your Grandpa’s Dirty Movies: The 16mm Pornographic Underground
Dan Erdman, Media Burn

A historical consequence of the introduction of 16mm that has often been overlooked is the wave of pornographic films that followed in its wake, all shot, distributed, and screened illegally and secretly. This talk will demonstrate how the history of pornographic movies—often called “stag films”—has run parallel to the history of 16mm film itself, at first supplementing existing social practices, only to eventually develop into the primary medium for an independent culture of production and exhibition that would take on a life of its own. By demonstrating, through the use of primary sources, the ways in which stag films were sold by their makers and utilized by their audiences, this presentation will contribute to the general store of knowledge about this obscure corner of 16mm film history, and aid in the preservation of this most misunderstood material.

3:15 PM – 4:15 PM
Archivists and/as Educators: Activating Film-Related Materials
Dimitrios Latsis, University of Alabama
Eric Hoyt, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Mary Huelsbeck, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Adrianne Lundy, NYU, MIAP

This roundtable invites teachers and archivists working with film-related media, either as curated collections, primary sources for research or teaching tools, to discuss pedagogical and information literacy strategies for activating the archive in teaching film and media history. Archivists who have had experience collaborating with instructors will be discussing specific talking points and student feedback as part of their contributions to this roundtable discussion. A related focus of the roundtable is the use of archives in social justice activism.

3:15 PM – 3:45 PM
StoryCorps Virtual: Tackling Video Recording During the Pandemic
Patty Devery, StoryCorps
Sunni Wong, StoryCorps

During the COVID-19 pandemic, StoryCorps created a video conferencing platform built on Vonage Tokbox technology to record our interviews, which had previously been audio-only and recorded in person. The Recording & Archive department worked closely with the Digital Innovation team to develop, test, and implement this platform. As part of the planning process, we discussed needed features, audio specs, and workflow needs, which were included in the initial launch. As we moved into the long-term reality of the pandemic, we started working on the “2.0” version of the platform for a better experience for our participants and facilitators with UX and archiving compatibility upgrades. The StoryCorps Virtual platform is now a part of what StoryCorps offers our participants and partner organizations, broadening our reach and allowing for greater accessibility. This presentation will discuss the technical details of the platform, ingest workflows, lessons learned, and where the platform is headed.

3:45 PM – 4:15 PM
SGS: Decoding Colonial Ideology in Sponsored Travel Films: Holiday Native Land
Brian Virostek, Library and Archives Canada
Nicolas Renaud, Concordia University

A presentation of excerpts and a description of the creative process behind Holiday Native Land, a montage experiment that remixes sponsored films from the 1920s to the 70s that advertised the Canadian wilderness as a holiday destination. These films’ commercial objectives and spectacular views lie on the surface of an ideology of modernity and power. They reflect a collective need for power over the land and the First Peoples connected to it. Through the recombination of images, music, and narration in a diptych composition, Holiday Native Land explores the colonial unconscious lurking in these enchanting Canadian landscapes, making connections between different eras, locations, and voices. This film is an example of collaboration between the artist in the archive and the artist-scholar as well as a dialog between Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspectives. Holiday Native Land highlights a collaborative and innovative method of preserving, researching, and interrogating 16mm sponsored films.

3:45 PM – 4:15 PM
A Rebuild Season: Restoring the Baseball Hall of Fame Archives
Caleb Simonds, National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum

The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum Recorded Media Archives (RMA) contains approximately 14,000 hours of moving images and sound recordings in a variety of formats, documenting the history of baseball and the institution. Content includes home movies of Hall of Famers, fan-shot footage of historic stadiums, recordings of institutional events such as the Hall of Fame Induction Weekend, and rare interviews with Negro Leagues players. For years the majority of the collection has been inaccessible to both staff and researchers, but after a year of rebuilding, the RMA is in a position to make a comeback. This presentation from the Rebuild Project Co-Lead will familiarize attendees with the collection and present a timeline for the RMA restoration, outlining the steps taken to renovate the space, rethink best practices for accessibility, and to establish goals for the future of the RMA within the museum.

4:30 PM – 5:30 PM
SGS: Tomorrow’s Promises: Researching and Restoring the Films of Edward Owens
Kyle Westphal, Chicago Film Society
Carolyn Faber, John M. Flaxman Library at the School of the Art Institute
Emily Martin, Video Data Bank

Edward Owens (1949–2010) had a brief but sterling career in underground cinema in the late 1960s. Mentored as a teenager by Gregory Markopoulos at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Owens demonstrated a unique creative vision and a technical dexterity with superimposition that belied his youth. Despite international festival recognition and the support of tastemakers such as Jonas Mekas and Parker Tyler, Owens did not sustain a career. He made four films on 16mm by the age of 20, and then faded from the scene without a trace. A queer, Black teenage prodigy whose style mixed obtuse experimentalism with the awestruck love of a home movie maven, Owens was long absent from histories of the American avant-garde. A consortium of institutions came together to research and restore Owens’s 16mm output. The multi-year project will be detailed by curators, programmers, and preservationists who contributed to restoring Owen’s legacy.

4:30 PM – 5:30 PM
Producing Short Documentaries using Archival Footage
Lance Watsky, Filmic Technologies
Tuesday Sweeney, University of Colorado Boulder
Karen Steiger, Dominican University

This session will introduce audiences to a successful remote film preservation internship program that can be replicated at other archives and institutions. For the past three years, Lance Watsky coordinated an internship, assigning interns around the country to use digitized newsreel footage to create three- to five-minute short productions on the topic of their choice. Interns are responsible for researching their topic, finding the “decisive moment” in film footage, and identifying targeted audiences for their documentaries. During the presentation, there will be a panel discussion involving Lance Watsky, and former interns Karen Steiger, Tuesday Sweeney, and possibly others, followed by a screening of select documentaries. The purpose of the presentation is to inspire librarians and archivists to connect their material to new audiences and provide interns with a production that they can share for networking and personal purposes.

4:30 PM – 5:30 PM
Mishaps and Discoveries : Turning Mistakes Into Techniques
Dino Everett, USC HMH Fouondation Archive
Shai Drori, Timeless Recordings
Rachel Del Gaudio

The panel being proposed is one of reality and will have each of the presenters exposing mishaps and  accidents that they have experienced while working in the field. This can be as easy as accidentally erasing a newly  created digital file to the discovering the entire contents of a film reel piled up on the floor while someone was not  looking. The purpose is not to reveal that the presenters are in some way bad archivists but to acknowledge (especially  for those entering the field) that no one is immune from mistakes and everyone will eventually make some.. The  important thing is what do we learn from these mistakes and in these cases the presenters will also be revealing new  techniques and tricks they have learned and now use in their workflow that were developed directly from these  mistakes.

5:30 PM – 6:30 PM
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.

6:30 PM – 8:00 PM
Buses to Archival Screening Night

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

9:00 PM – 9:45 PM
Buses Depart for Hotel

8:30 AM – 9:30 AM
AMIA 2023 Closing Keynote

9:00 AM – 10:00 AM
Coffee & Tea Break

Grab a cup of coffee or tea in the Pavilion. Thanks to our friends at PRO-TEK!

9:00 AM – 2:00 PM
The Pavilion

Don’t miss an opportunity to visit the Pavilion! Our goal is to create a hub for sharing information at the conference.

Highlights include –

• Time to refresh your professional headshot? Time to get your first professional headshot? A professional photographer will be set up in the Pavilion 11:30am – 1:00pm to help you out. It’s free for everyone.
• Catch the Pavilion Screening: It’s Home Movie Day’s 20th anniversary! The Center for Home Movies reached out to hosts, archives and contributors from years past to put together a Happy Birthday clip show!

9:45 AM – 10:45 AM
GBAV and GBH’s NEH Challenge Grant to Preserve and Digitize At-Risk Media
Raananah Sarid-Segal, GBH Educational Foundation
George Blood, GBAV
Peter Higgins, GBH
Samantha Driscoll, GBH
Caroline Mango, GBH

Explication of our work over the last 3 years in shipping, digitizing, and making available to members of GBH previously relatively inaccessible material through internal service Avalon. Will walk through life cycle from tape to digital asset. The GBH project goal was to digitize 1/3 of the collection, about 83,000 items on deteriorating and obsolete formats; to update the Open Vault website for public access; lessen technical debt by aligning and eliminating diverse metadata stores and access technology, and develop a sustaining ability to archive future digital GBH productions. WGBH leveraged a capital campaign that was under way to focus major donors on supporting the GBH archive by identifying key collections to be digitized. The presentation will share processes, results, and experience.

9:45 AM – 10:45 AM
SGS: A Modern Microcinema: Hand-Manipulated Films and the Living Legacy of 16mm Film
Justin Clifford Rhody, No Name Cinema
Abigail Smith, No Name Cinema

This presentation contextualizes No Name Cinema (NNC) within the history of microcinemas and small-gauge alternative film exhibition in the United States. It also provides an overview of the continued usage of 16mm film in contemporary artistic practices through a deep dive into the thriving activities of NNC—a microcinema, gallery and community gathering space that specializes in small gauge film exhibition in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This presentation will also include a screening of The Interior Frontier (a recent short by the artists shot on Super-8 and 16mm), as well as an expanded cinema performance involving analyst and regular 16mm projectors, dual 35mm slide projectors (with found slides previously soaked in rat urine, currently covered in mold), and live improvised sound created in collaboration with Gretchen Korsmo. This screening addresses the historical artistic uses of 16mm for the creation of experimental film as a living tradition by presenting contemporary films by artists working in the medium today. These works explore the essential physicality of film, utilizing the economy and accessibility of the 16mm format which can be projected in non-commercial settings like the microcinema.

9:45 AM – 10:15 AM
Preserving the Legacy of Black Performing Arts
Morgan Gieringer, University of North Texas

The Black Academy of Arts and Letters (TBAAL) is a 43-year old arts organization whose mission is to promote, foster, and preserve artistic expressions of African, African American, and Caribbean communities.   The TBAAL Archive, transferred to the University of North Texas in 2014, includes over 1,000 recordings of original performances and events presented by TBAAL. In 2021 UNT began an NHPRC funded project to digitize these historic recordings, ensuring that the history of TBAAL and the unique contributions of artists such as Margaret Walker, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Kirk Franklin, Esther Rolle, Jennifer Holliday, and Erykah Badu will be preserved for future generations.   This session will include information about the importance of diverse digital archives, writing a successful grant for moving image digitization and cover the workflows employed by project staff for digitization, transcription and metadata. Discovery and accessibility of digitized recordings is enhanced by time-based transcription for each recording.

10:15 AM – 10:45 AM
Creating Chronology from Chaos: Using AI-based Methods to Organize Archives
Louise Ledeen, ChromaDiverse, Inc.

ChromaDiverse, a 501c3 non-profit arts service organization, specializes in protecting, preserving, and presenting archives of performing arts companies. ChromaDiverse was founded in 2019 by Judy Tyrus, a principal dancer with the Dance Theatre of Harlem for 22 years. She then became the company’s curator and archivist. Tyrus saw that most multicultural performing arts companies did not have the resources to preserve their legacy and mitigate erasure.  As president of ChromaDiverse, Ms. Tyrus began focusing on applying technology to accelerate the process of chronologically organizing, cataloging, and digitizing collections of photographs, audio, videotapes, and other hand-drawn assets.   This presentation is based on a case study of the Oakland Ballet Company (OBC) and how ChromaDiverse created CD SmartCapture, an AI-based software application intended to extract key words from digitized Playbills and performance programs to develop the metadata schema and map the associated assets with increased accuracy and speed.

11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
SGS Roundtable: Small Gauge and Amateur Film in 20
Hugo Ljungbäck, University of Chicago
Louisa Trott, University of Tennessee
Patricia Ledesma Villon, Walker Art Center

The “digital turn” in commercial film production and projection has prompted a new generation of filmmakers to rediscover and revitalize small gauge film practices, while digitization has provided new platforms for nontheatrical film collections through online streaming sites like YouTube and the Internet Archive. Digital technologies have also made it possible for thousands of hours of amateur media to be created, posted, streamed, and circulated through apps like Facebook, TikTok, and Snapchat every day, intensifying concerns about saving amateur media in a digital culture where today’s trends will be forgotten tomorrow, as the “digital dark age” looms ever closer. The goal of this open forum is to bring together archivists, technicians, artists, scholars, researchers, and students—“veterans” and “newcomers” alike—to spotlight and examine current issues and concerns for our field, and to help determine our priorities and directions for the near- and long-term future.

11:00 AM – 11:30 AM
Bringing the Gault Collection Home: Community Engagement through Archival Collaboration
Kathy Rose O’Regan, San Francisco Silent Film Festival

Archives do not operate in a vacuum – at least we don’t have to! The San Francisco Silent Film Festival (SFSFF), Chicago Academy of Sciences, and the Irish Film Institute (IFI) worked openly and collaboratively along with local historians to restore the Gault Collection. Filmed in one of the few remaining Irish (Irish Gaelic) speaking areas of Ireland in the earliest days of the newly founded Irish Free State, the Gault Collection provides an astonishing window into rural Irish culture during a pivotal time in the country’s history. As archivists, access should always be our goal. The Gault Collection restoration project is an excellent example of what can be achieved when institutions work together toward a common end, in consultation with community members who so often can contribute exponentially more to a project through local knowledge than can be achieved through institutional research alone.

11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Appalshop After the Flood: Navigating Water Damage and Regional Disasters
Fin Hatfield, Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) at New York University (NYU)
Juana Suarez, MIAP – NYU
Caroline Rubens, Appalshop Archive
Skip Elsheimer, A/V Geeks

Delve into the challenges of water damage recovery in audiovisual archives following the 2022 flood at Appalshop in Whitesburg Kentucky. As climate change intensifies weather patterns, archives will face increased risk for large-scale damage, resulting in the need for large-scale recovery projects with budgetary limitations. Reflect on the flood and theAPEX action done on site this October, which was a collaboration between Skip Elsheimer from A/V Geeks, Caroline Rubens from Appalshop, Juana Suárez from MIAP and APEX, and MIAP students Anthony Gonzalez, Fin Hatfield, and Jenny Hsu who as part of a class project helped organize the action and plan some of the workflows. The panel will discuss several issues that archives face after regional natural disasters, and recommendations for long-term disaster recovery. By comparing current best practices and actionable recommendations, we aim to develop more strategies that are tailored for similar situations.

11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
From CRTs to LEDs: Evaluating the Translation Amongst Video Displays
Dave Rice, CUNY
Jim Leonard, oldskool
Ben Turkus, NYPL

The performance discrepancies between cathode ray tube displays and modern LED/LCD based monitors can provide numerous challenges for archivists that strive to sustain a consistent presentation experience to obsolete content. This panel delves into the challenges, corner cases, and solutions offered to address such discrepancies. The panel will review and explore methods for presenting interlaced video, telecined video, and overscanned video. How well do access copies of NTSC SD video at 720×486 mimic the original playback technology? Should access files for NTSC video present 29.97 frames per second or would presenting the images as fields (twice as many at half the height) be more authentic? This panel reviews the trace of the cathrode ray against the refreshed pixels of the LCD and explores the consequences and side effects transitions content from one form of display to another.

11:30 AM – 12:00 PM
Stratified Approaches to Audiovisual Preservation
Ben Harry, BYU — Special Collections

Best practices for video preservation are still in development. In the last eight years there has been greater adoption of FFV1 and J2K as preservation formats. For small institutions, digital preservation of video still may be prohibitive even with these helpful lossless compression schemes. With limited storage space, we have come up with methods to allocate resources more responsibly. We have sought a way to meet the needs of video content with flexibility so as to allow for targeted resource allocation. This presentation outlines the factors we have considered, our approaches, and some results.

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

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

12:30 PM – 1:30 PM
Screening: Transsexuals (Susan Milano, Elyshia Pass, Shridhar Bapat, Daniel Landau, Garret Ormiston, USA, 1971)
Adam Charles Hart, Media Burn Archive
Sara Chapman, Media Burn Archive
Susan Milano, Independent Artist/Curator

Fifty years ago, it was virtually impossible to access gender affirming surgery in the United States, so Deborah Hartin, one of the individuals featured in this documentary, traveled all the way to a doctor in Casablanca to achieve what she had long wanted. Having spent most of her 20-plus years trying to conform to life in the body of a man, she ultimately made the choice to follow her destiny and fully become the person she knew herself to be.    A year after her surgery, a group of video production students interviewed Hartin for a documentary they were making about the subject. Along with Esther Reilly and others in the transgender community, Hartin shared her story and revealed how the procedure had transformed her body. Because of technical limitations, TRANSSEXUALS could not be broadcast on commercial television. It was never distributed and rarely shown publicly.

2:00 PM – 3:00 PM
It’s Your Film, Not You. Vinegar Syndrome Case Studies
Susan P. Etheridge, Packard Humanities Institute
Kimberly Tarr, New York University
Greg Wilsbacher, University of South Carolina

Acetate deterioration (aka “vinegar syndrome”) has been an existential threat to moving image archives for decades. There is currently no universal standard for the prevention and mitigation of vinegar syndrome. As a result, archives the world over have developed a wide range of physical and environmental practices to combat acetate deterioration. But what works and what doesn’t? What is fact, and what is fiction? This panel will introduce the audience to the AMIA Preservation Committee’s Vinegar Syndrome Project, a forthcoming online guide to acetate deterioration.

2:00 PM – 3:00 PM
Enhancing AV Accessibility with Whisper AI: 4 Threads of Research
Dave Rodriguez, Florida State University
Nina Rao, Emory University
Owen King, GBH
Chloe McLaren, Cornell University

Automated speech recognition (ASR) has evolved significantly in recent years, offering organizations stewarding AV materials unprecedented opportunities to leverage these tools to increase the accessibility and discoverability of their digital collections. In this session, panelists from 4 different institutions will discuss their experiences and research evaluating and implementing ASR tools into their preservation workflows, with a specific focus on Whisper AI, an open source, command-line utility developed by OpenAI. The panelists will discuss their distinct but connected areas of research related to using and configuring Whisper, providing organizations engaged in similar research or interested in starting up valuable time and resource-saving information. From the session, attendees will gain insight into the strengths and weaknesses of leveraging ASR tools, the challenges and opportunities presented by the technology, and practical guidance on how to develop or expand AV accessibility-related projects.

2:00 PM – 3:00 PM
Women on Tape: Recovering Early Women’s Video Culture
Adam Charles Hart, Media Burn Archive
Helena Shaskevitch, City University of New York
Susan Milano, Independent Artist/Curator
Dan Erdman, Media Burn Archive

The early 1970s saw a flourishing of vital video work made by women, but these artists had few outlets and their work went largely unseen. This panel will discuss this country-wide community of artists and the network of festivals and screenings they created to showcase each other’s work, as well as recent attempts to preserve and share early women’s videos.

3:00 PM – 3:30 PM
Coffee & Tea Break

Grab a cup of coffee or tea. Thanks to our friends at DigiPres Labs!

3:15 PM – 4:15 PM
Analog Film Preservation in 2023
Diane Carroll-Yacoby, Eastman Kodak Co
Andrew Oran, FotoKem
Thomas Aschenbach, Colorlab

From FotoKem, workflows utilizing analog FILM from the OPPENHEIMER project will be discussed. Kodak will discuss the creation of a custom format B&W Negative film which was utilized in the project. Drawing from a broad spectrum of film projects undertaken by Colorlab, discussions will include the critical role of film in not only preserving but also enabling exhibitions and enhancing digital works. We’ll include discussion on the tangible impacts of recording digital works onto film. Discussions will address the challenges of material preservation and archival longevity, essential aspects often overlooked in digital productions. Equally, we take a deep dive into the exhibition aspects, revealing how the choice of medium can profoundly influence audience perception and engagement.

3:15 PM – 3:45 PM
Toward Open Platform for AI-assisted Smart Archives
Kelley Lynch, Brandeis University

The Computational Linguistics Applications for Multimedia Services (CLAMS) platform provides access to free and open-source computational content analysis tools for multimedia material. We previously presented CLAMS at AMIA meeting 2020 as an initial prototype implementation.  This year we present a robust update of the prototype implementation. The platform now sports a variety of image, video, audio and text processing tools that interact via a common  multi-modal representation language named MMIF (Multi-Media Interchange Format). We describe the overall architecture, some of the tools included in the platform, the process to set up and run complex workflows, visualizations included in CLAMS, and evaluate aspects of the platform on data from the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, showing how  CLAMS can add metadata to mass-digitized multimedia collections, metadata that are typically only available implicitly in now largely unsearchable digitized media in archives and libraries.

3:15 PM – 4:15 PM
An Artist in the Archive: Ode to the Underloved
Crystal Z Campbell, University at Buffalo
Almudena Escobar Lopez, Toronto Metropolitan University

An Artist in the Archive: Ode to the Underloved will focus on the possibilities of historical rupture posed by artistic intervention in the archive or conversely, in the absence of an archive. Presented by Oklahoma native and artist, Crystal Z Campbell, in direct response to the AMIA 2023 Conference location in Tulsa, Oklahoma, this session will present artistic strategies for work around public secrets, centering Tulsa’s history as a case study. Campbell has engaged with the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in multiple bodies of work ranging from painting, public art, writing, and film installations, and will discuss the challenges of working in Oklahoma state where the work has been censored and removed from exhibitions, as well as the gatekeeping of archives that perpetuate century long silences, complicated by bans on critical race theory. In addition to addressing modes of how Campbell has worked with and against archival modes of preservation, Campbell’s talk will share strategies for how artists can bring forth histories hidden in plain sight and imagine how archival ruptures can be forms of care or repair.

3:45 PM – 4:15 PM
AMPlifying a Collection: Leveraging AI to Generate Transcripts [and more]
Emily Lynema, Indiana University Libraries
Carmel Curtis, Indiana University Libraries

In 2015, Indiana University (IU) undertook a massive project to digitize audio, video, and film assets resulting in over 350,000 digitized items. With support from the Mellon Foundation, the IU Libraries collaborated on the development of the open source Audiovisual Metadata Platform (AMP) to help address the lack of descriptive metadata for these materials. Using AMP, archivists and librarians can more easily leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning services for tasks such as speech-to-text, named entity recognition, scene detection, and facial recognition to support identification, discovery, and rights determination for digital collections. This session will provide an overview of AMP and then share the results of a pilot project using AMP to create transcripts for a portion of the IU Libraries Moving Image Achive’s Clio Awards collection. Currently in process, this collection includes thousands of reels of television, movie, and radio ads from the 1960s through the 1990s.

4:30 PM – 5:30 PM
It Came From Beneath the Bay: Found Footage Films 1988-2019
Greta Snider, San Francisco State University
Courtney Fellion, San Francisco State University

This screening session looks at films made by students and alums of the San Francisco State University’s School of Cinema, whose program has a rich and storied record of engaging with creative re-use of media. Courtney Fellion looks at re-appropriation of found footage by SFSU student filmmakers in the Reagan era, including alums Craig Baldwin (Rocket Kit Congo Kit, 1986), Lynne Sachs (The House of Science: a museum of false facts, 1991), and Cauleen Smith (Chronicles of a Lying Spirit, 1991) in whose counter-archival films the readymade material has taken on a subversive double meaning. Greta Snider will explore the navigation of the boundaries of sexuality and identity in the found footage films of SFSU alums Michael Wallin (Decodings, 1988), Natalie Tsui (International Face, 2019), and Ellie Vanderlip (With Their Feet Flat On the Floor, 2019) in which the orphaned material must serve the dual purposes of detournement and metaphor.

4:30 PM – 5:30 PM
Activist Archiving: Centering Human Rights, Deploying Open Source Tools Internationally
Alex Esenler, OpenArchive

Activist Archiving: Centering Human Rights, Deploying Open Source Tools Internationally    This session seeks to explore the deployment of new archival technologies and tools within communities. Attendees will have a chance to learn about OpenArchive and Save – a workflow tool built with and for activist and archivist communities – and our recent work in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the MENA region. This forum will be a participatory session to discuss how OpenArchive’s method of deploying Save adapts to different community needs and contexts. We are keen to connect with an interdisciplinary audience that works across fields and geographic regions – and draw on their experience and expertise – to further explore best practices for implementation, fostering the adoption of new technologies, and iterating on deployment processes. We would like to create a lasting conversation with participants and foster new partnerships.

4:30 PM – 5:30 PM
Reframing Preservation and Acquisition through Inclusive and Reparative Description Projects
Taylor Morales, Academy Film Archive
Shani Miller, Academy Film Archive

How can moving image archives intentionally integrate equity and inclusion into acquisition and preservation decision making? This session will introduce one potential resource. Led by a consortium of seven moving image archives, In Frame seeks to identify gaps in more than 100 years of film preservation through the creation of an open access database of filmmakers and films across broad areas of focus related to disability, ethnicity, gender, race, and sexual orientation. This session will begin with a brief overview of the In Frame project which uses scholarly texts, film festival catalogs, and other sources to identify historically underrepresented films and filmmakers. The speakers will then facilitate an open discussion with attendees about the potential impact and implications of this work and similar projects on acquisition and preservation practices. We hope this session will encourage and empower archives to make representation and inclusion a core tenet of their policies.

5:45 PM – 6:45 PM
Closing Cocktails

Grab a drink and say goodbye to colleagues before heading out to enjoy your last night in Tulsa.

10:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Community Archiving Workshop
Organizers:
Pamela Vadakan, Community Archiving Workshop
Grace Lile, Independent
Mona Jimenez, Community Archiving Workshop
Kate Dollenmayer, Prelinger Archives
Jackie Jay, Farallon Archival Consulting LLC

Trainees:
Carmel Curtis, Indiana University
Elizabeth Hansen, Texas Archive of the Moving Image
John Horsechief, Osage Nation Museum
Justin Lemons, University of North Texas Libraries
Kristin MacDonough, Video Data Bank
Guadalupe Martinez, California Revealed
Jerrid Miller, Cherokee Nation Language Department (Archives)
Hannah Palin, Moving Image Preservation of Puget Sound
Ari Negovschi Regalado, Texas Archive of the Moving Image
Stephanie Stewart, American Song Archives
Grace Stroud, American Song Archives
Lulu Ziliniskas, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum

Community Archiving Workshop (CAW) provides moving image archivists the opportunity to serve the community of Tulsa and work with local volunteers to help an organization gain intellectual and physical control over an endangered audiovisual collection. The workshop provides a space for conference attendees to partner with local volunteers to conduct basic processing, cataloging and inspection and, by doing so, will learn how to identify risk factors and make preservation recommendations.    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 Tulsa community and learn about local history.