AMIA 2026 | Program

Please note that this is a preliminary program. Information is all subject to change. 

8:30 AM – 12:30 PM – Separate registration required
Compact Cassette Repair and Rehousing

• Karl Fleck, Northeast Document Conservation Center
• Bryce Roe, NEDCC

Repairs of compact cassettes are an inevitable part of the digitization process. However, compact cassettes are finicky! They can degrade in the same way as open reel tapes, and their myriad components are tiny. Therefore, specialized techniques and considerations are required when undertaking this kind of work.  This introductory/beginner-level workshop will be a hands-on class dedicated to the intricacies of repairing compact cassettes for digitization. It will include techniques for disassembling the cassette shell; safe handling of the tape pack; repairing and replacing splicing tape; and rehousing.

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8:30 AM – 12:30 PM – Separate registration required
Sustainable AI for Sovereign Audiovisual Archives

• Erik Mannens, Ghent University
• Matthias Priem, Meemoo

AI is rapidly transforming audiovisual archives through automated metadata generation, restoration, transcription, recommendation systems, and synthetic media workflows. Yet many current AI systems remain energy-intensive, opaque, difficult to audit, and heavily dependent on external technology providers. How can archives embrace AI innovation while safeguarding sustainability, authenticity, transparency, and institutional sovereignty? This workshop explores Sustainable AI as a pathway toward trustworthy and sovereign AI infrastructures for audiovisual heritage institutions, based on Flemish Use Cases of Meemoo & Limecraft. Participants will discuss practical and strategic approaches for creating AI systems that are more energy-efficient, explainable, auditable, and aligned with archival ethics and public values. Topics include AI provenance, synthetic media verification, multimodal archival reasoning, vendor lock-in, environmental impact, and governance frameworks for AI-enabled archives. The workshop is designed for archivists, preservation specialists, media technologists, and cultural heritage professionals seeking to better understand the long-term implications of AI for audiovisual preservation and access.

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9:00 AM – 5:00 PM – Separate registration required
Film Restoration Essentials for Small Archives and Non-Profits

• Fabio Bedoya, Filmfinity

This hands-on workshop introduces the essentials of digital film restoration for small archives, non-profits, and practitioners who need practical restoration knowledge without a large facility behind them. Using DaVinci Resolve and prepared sample media, participants will learn how to assess film scans, organize a restoration project, balance color and density, approach stabilization, reduce common dust and dirt problems, manage grain and noise, compare results, and document decisions. The workshop is designed for beginner to intermediate attendees. Participants should bring a laptop with DaVinci Resolve installed and enough storage for workshop media. DaVinci Resolve Studio is preferred, but the free version can be used to follow along with limitations. A short final section will introduce open-source and local AI experiments, including what machine-learning tools can and cannot do responsibly. The goal is practical confidence: knowing what can be done in-house, what should be outsourced, and how to evaluate restoration work responsibly.

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9:00 AM – 5:00 PM – Separate registration required
Technical Basics for Non-Engineers

• James Snyder, consultant

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.

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1:30 PM – 5:30 PM – Separate registration required
Creating your Own Organizational Sustainability Playbook

• Katherine Kim, Educopia
• Sherr Lo, Nonprofit Finance Fund
• Sendy, Alcidonis
• Rachel Mattson, Educopia

What do you do when a major source of funding is no longer available? What happens when the strategic plan you developed in the past doesn’t apply to current circumstances? How can you plan for organizational sustainability while navigating uncertainty?   This workshop led by staff from Educopia and the Nonprofit Finance Fund will introduce a core set of principles and tools that support adaptive planning around organizational sustainability in three major strategic areas: finances, leadership and decision-making, and stakeholder engagement.   The playbook and facilitation will introduce tools around:  – Assessing your organization’s current situation and identifying vulnerabilities  – Scenario planning for your organization, with a focus on finances – Understanding and transforming your organization’s decision-making processes  – Engaging stakeholders in meaningful, equitable partnerships   Level up your skills and use existing frameworks creatively to ensure that your mission-driven work can continue to thrive even under these difficult conditions.

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8:30 AM – 10:30 AM
Welcome & Keynote

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11:00 AM – 11:30 AM
From Archive to Exhibition: Preserving and Presenting Video Art

• Nilson Carroll, Visual Studies Workshop

Since 2023, Visual Studies Workshop has worked closely with the artist Peer Bode to preserve his personal archive of video works dating from 1976-1985, mostly made at the Experimental Television Center. This process of preservation and re-discovery led to the exhibition Peer Bode: Signal into Memory (Feb. 6 – June 6, 2026) in the VSW Gallery as well as the book Peer Bode: Open Fields, published by VSW Press.  From Archive to Exhibition is a case study on this extended preservation project, and will discuss how preservation does not stop at the transferring of videotapes. The presentation will cover ways in which archivists, curators, and artists can work together holistically toward alternative modes of preservation, presentation, and distribution, and reflect on what VSW learned through this process. Excerpts from Bode’s videos as well as documentation from the exhibition will be shown.

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11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Archivists Giving Back

• Linda Tadic, Digital Bedrock
• Nancy Watrous, Chicago Film Archives
• Dave Rice, Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
• Jim Lindner, Media Matters

Audiovisual archivists work in and use archives, digitize analog media to digital file formats, and preserve the digital files.  Over the decades, some in the field felt an imperative to contribute to the community by creating regional archives; developing open-source preservation formats and tools; inventing technologies to aid in preserving audiovisual media; and founding service provider companies to assist archives in their preservation work. These archivists saw a need, and contributed solutions.   This panel features four presenters who gave (and continue to give) back to the community. They will describe why they saw a need, how they came to their solutions, and their journeys in bringing their projects to maturity.  Struggles, failures, successes, and joy will be presented in an honest discussion. The session will hopefully inspire others in the field who have been considering developing tools, or founding archives and services to benefit the community, to make that leap, and do it.

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11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Completing the Incomplete: Using Photos, Promotional Materials, and Documentary Evidence in Film Restoration

• Mary Huelsbeck, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research
• Robert Byrne, San Francisco Film Preserve
• Dennis Doros, Milestone Film & Video
• Jenny Romero, Harry Ransom Center University of Texas at Austin

Film preservationists can scour the world for every surviving print, element, and negative when undertaking a restoration. Yet despite their efforts, portions of a film—from a few missing frames to entire sequences—may remain lost because the footage was destroyed, discarded, or deteriorated beyond use.  One approach to addressing these gaps is to use photographs, lobby cards, scripts, and other documentation to reconstruct or contextualize missing material. However, archivists have long debated the ethical implications of such interventions. For example, is it appropriate to incorporate still photographs or promotional materials?  How and when should digital technologies be utilized?  This panel will explore these issues through discussion of the documentation that informs restoration decisions, ethical frameworks that guide decision-making, and current challenges facing the field, including the responsible use of AI.

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11:30 AM – 12:00 PM
Days of Future Past: Maintaining Access to 140 Years of Film and Tape Content

• James Snyder, Consultant

This presentation examines both the technical and strategic hurdles involved in preserving access to legacy media, while also managing and integrating legacy content converted to digital files with the rapid growth of born-digital content.  The session will highlight two key areas of work: the challenges and successes of developing lower-cost, high-quality film scanning technologies for archival and production preservation, and ongoing efforts to maintain access to tape media by providing new spare parts for existing tape machines, as well as designing next-generation audio and video tape playback systems in response to the imminent disappearance of legacy tape playback hardware manufactured during the original production runs from the 1950s to the 2020s. Together these initiatives underscore the urgency of maintaining access to historical formats while building future-ready preservation and reuse workflows integrated with today’s data storage and AI-related tool kits.

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12:30 PM – 1:30 PM
Screening Session: From the Cellar to the Cinema: Pittsburgh Sound + Image’s Origins

• Steven Haines, Pittsburgh Sound + Image

Archivist and programmer Steven Haines introduces you to Pittsburgh film culture past and present. Over the last decade, using an archival activist approach of locating the nearly forgotten films and people of the region’s cinematic history, Steven has helped cultivate a people-first film culture which collapses boundaries between archives and cinema, spectator and participant. This presentation will feature a narrated tour of highlights from the archives of Pittsburgh Sound + Image, screening 16mm treasures from the collection, and using those as a jumping off point for stories of the people behind the reels.

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12:30 PM – 1:30 PM
Screening Session: Mid-Century Amateur Film/Photo Culture in the Ira Current Collection

• Jamie Marie Wagner, University of Colorado Boulder
• JoAnna Ramsey, University of Colorado Boulder Libraries

Within the extensive home movie collection of Ira Current—longtime chemist at the Agfa-Ansco film company in Binghamton, NY—one can catch fascinating glimpses into many aspects of amateur film and photography culture in mid-century America: footage from inside Ansco; candid test footage shot to demonstrate newly-developed Anscochrome color film shock; meetings of the Binghamton Camera Club; short narrative melodramas featuring members of the Binghamton Civic Theater; and footage of Current’s home workshop projects, including a sound-on-film camera he built and tested with his young children in 1950/1951.

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12:30 PM – 1:30 PM

Screening Session: Progression By Destruction: Community Displacement in Los Angeles

• Jessica Sanchez, Hollywood Heritage

With cities all over the world currently grappling with rising populations and housing crises, let’s look back to Los Angeles in the 1950s and 1960s to see approaches taken by the City Housing Authority and Community Redevelopment Agencies. These films show how the post war population boom was used to justify the demolition of homes people lived in, ultimately leading to the demise of 2 once thriving communities: Chavez Ravine and Old Bunker Hill.

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2:00 PM – 2:30 PM
AI Assisted Artistry for Film Restoration

• Brian Gaffney, MTI FILM

Abstract Archival film collections face a persistent and growing challenge: physical damage, missing frames, irreparable chemical decay, and the deterioration of unique materials that cannot be re-shot or re-sourced. Traditional analog and digital restoration techniques, while powerful, are limited in their ability to reconstruct material that simply no longer exists. This paper presents AI-Assisted Artistry as a new paradigm in archival restoration — one in which generative AI frame inference, guided by skilled human operators, allows preservation professionals to recover and reconstruct damaged or missing content with unprecedented fidelity.  Drawing on MTI FILM’s experience across multiple restoration projects — including Paramount’s 2024 4K restoration of Sunset Boulevard, the Film Foundation’s Topkapi, and Sony Picture Classics’ Frank Capra Collection — this paper examines how AI-based tools integrated into the CORTEX platform and MTai toolkit enable restorers to address frame loss, tear damage, raking, and physical degradation in ways that extend, rather than replace, their artistic judgment.  The presentation argues that the most effective AI restoration workflows are those designed around human oversight: AI reduces tedium and opens new possibilities; the archivist retains creative and ethical authority over the finished work.

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2:00 PM – 3:00 PM
Bless this Mess: Navigating Archival Grain by Building Cross-Disciplinary Partnerships

• Becca Hall, Chicago Film Archives/Chicago Film Society
• Agata Zborowska, University of Chicago/KU Leuven
• Mickey Gral, Chicago Film Archives
• Julian Antos, Chicago Film Society

The panel shares a story of a unique three-year collaboration that centered on a research and archival project that brought together an academic researcher, archivists, community organizations, and film exhibitors. Since 2023, University of Chicago postdoctoral fellow Agata Zborowska has been a scholar-in-residence at Chicago Film Archives (CFA). In this capacity, she has worked on the Not-So-Ordinary project (www.not-so-ordinary.us/) to locate amateur and home movies from the Polish diaspora in Chicago, many of which have since become part of CFA’s collections. The purpose of this panel is to reflect on how these long-term collaborative relationships came to be, including the challenges and successes we all encountered along the way. The panel aims to critically explore the extent to which this model can be mutually beneficial for long-term collaborations, foster a multi-directional transfer of knowledge, and serve as a source of inspiration for cross-disciplinary projects that could not take place without such a partnership.

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2:00 PM – 3:00 PM
Getting it Right: Restoration of William Greaves’ THE FIGHT

• Elena Rossi-Snook, The New York Public Library
• Giles Sherwood, The Criterion Collection
• Jason Crump, Metropolis Post
• Andrew Oran, Fotokem

William Greaves was a master of nonfiction filmmaking in all its forms, from the experimental Symbiopsychotaxiplasm to education market classics such as Ida B. Wells: A Passion For Justice to the landmark public television series Black Journal.  His documentary of the 1971 Fight of the Century between Ali and Frazier, while perhaps one of the most famous of his subjects, is his most elusive work.  Shown only once in 1991, The Fight existed as a unique 35mm print from 1971.  The original footage, having been used for a half-dozen productions, was scattered over hundreds of film cans, or missing altogether.  In this panel discussion, the restoration team will review the years-long process of reconstituting from over two dozen film elements Greaves’ THE FIGHT while preserving the unique qualities of the film as a New York, cinema verité meditation on sport, money and exploitation.

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2:00 PM – 3:00 PM
Roundtable: Deletion in the Archive: Importances and Challenges of Digital Deaccessioning

• Ven Qiu, New York University

Deletion is a key function of data storage, yet a neglected concern in digital preservation. As historic record shifts toward the digital, cultural institutions are depending more on cloud storage and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) for stewarding history, with limited understanding for the efficacy of digital deaccessioning – deletion in the archive – should they decide that a record should no longer exist. This presents significant implications for digital rights and custodial control. Storage vendors are selected for their capacity to accumulate data, seldom for their commitment to delete it. This roundtable will forge a rare opportunity for digital archivists to treat deletion as a central concern and reassess our literacy around data removal. Discussion will cover current policies in place for deletion in the collections we steward, ethical implications of deletion for materials within those collections, and tools to conduct that deletion.

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2:30 PM – 3:00 PM
From Storage to Strategy: Evolving Digital Preservation at Paramount

• Jessica Storm, Paramount Pictures

As studios shift from tape-based and on-premises workflows to cloud-centered preservation, archivists must manage growing asset volumes while improving discovery and long-term access. This presentation offers a practical look at how Paramount Pictures’ Digital Archive is building preservation at scale through digital delivery, structured work orders, metadata creation, and ALIAS DAM as a system of record. It will show how cloud-based delivery has improved Paramount’s preservation workflows, using statistics to illustrate the results. The presentation will also preview ONEVAULT, Paramount’s new effort to bring digital and physical archival assets together across its brands, while sharing early challenges and takeaways from the rollout.

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3:15 PM – 4:15 PM
Archiving on the Margins of Legality

• Hannah Garibaldi, Netflix, UC Santa Barbara
• Margaret Mertz, Netflix
• Janet Reinschmidt, Academy Film Archive
• Kelsey Moore, UC Santa Barbara
• Tori De Santiago, Margaret Herrick Library

The rapid shifts in our increasingly digital industry have brought greater attention to how archivists (trained and otherwise) engage with the conditions and constraints of audiovisual collections through less than legal means. In this speculative discussion, we aim to explore how moving image archives have always worked on the margins of legal frameworks, presenting case studies from historical copyright defiers to current AI battles, community archiving initiatives to the role of VR in reframing history. How do discussions of archival preservation and access become more complicated when we consider the way archives, collections, and archivists challenge copyright, expand distribution, disrupt NDAs, and defy censorship? What are the ethical challenges when archival work operates at the edges of legality? And, crucially, how do we measure the risks and rewards of working on these margins?

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3:15 PM – 4:15 PM
Lightning Talks

• A Good Problem to Have: Windfall Digitization Funding
  Hilary Gunnels, Providence College
• Arkebara Collective: Strengthening Global Audiovisual Archives Through Horizontal Collaboration
  Wua Ling Wu, Independent Researcher
• Brigham Young University
  Michael Gates, Brigham Young University
• Lacunae and the Long Tail: Curating the Obama Presidency Oral History
  Chris Pandza, Department of Memory
• Obscuragraphy: Home Movies Documenting Eclipses
  Francesca C. DiBona, University of Southern California
• Preserving Oral Histories with Interactive Exhibits
  Craig Stubing, University of Southern California
  Katie Ehrbar, University of Southern California
• The Ups and Downs of Ongoing Optical Media Preservation
  Lauren Jefferson, American Archive of Public Broadcasting

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3:15 PM – 4:15 PM
From All Corners of Campus: Exploring Audiovisual Archives in Academia

• Giselle Hengst, Vanderbilt University
• Stephanie Sapienza, University of Maryland
• Eli Boonin-Vail, The University At Albany
• Janine Winfree, Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound
• Namrah Khan, Vanderbilt University

Representatives from four different audiovisual archives will showcase academic engagements with undergraduate students across a range of disciplines. Connecting students with archival media collections through hands-on, experiential learning opportunities both compliments coursework and supports interesting creative outputs that engage the public on important topics. The panelists will share how their work with students in religious studies, film history, cinema, and social sciences has resulted in innovative research, digital storytelling, and public exhibits which bring a new lens to archived materials. This panel will move beyond simply explaining how to help students conduct research using primary sources; it will leave the audience with actionable examples of creative reuse projects that keep both students and the public engaged with archival media collections.

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3:15 PM – 4:15 PM
Restoring Len Lye’s Experimental Color Films with Multi-spectral Scanning

• Kathy Rose O’Regan, San Francisco Film Preserve
• Rob Byrne, San Francisco Film Preserve
• Barbara Flueckiger, University of Zurich / Scan2Screen

Experimental filmmakers have long pushed film materials to their limits and nowhere is this more evident than in their use of rare, non-standard color processes. This session examines the scanning and restoration challenges posed by three such processes — Technicolor No. IV, Gasparcolor, and Dufaycolor — using the films of Len Lye as a case study. Each process presents distinct obstacles: the density and out-of-gamut colors of Technicolor dye-transfer prints; the unusual dyes, patchy texture, and emulsion thickness of Gasparcolor; and the notorious moiré artifacts triggered by Dufaycolor’s diagonal réseau. This session will demonstrate how multispectral scanning addressed these challenges, and walk through the restoration and derivative workflows developed by San Francisco Film Preserve. Attendees will leave with a practical framework for tackling unusual color processes in their own collections and a deeper appreciation for what’s at stake when we digitize experimental film.

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4:30 PM – 5:30 PM
The Digital Restoration of Athens, GA: Inside/Out

• Ruta Abolins, University of Georgia
• Margie Compton, University of Georgia
• Ryan Lewis, University of Georgia
• Stuart Baker, MCAF Media

This session explores entirely new ground for the Walter J.Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection, the digital restoration of the 1986 documentary, Athens, GA: Inside/Out.  We’ll cover the cultural and community impact of the film in music history, the donation of the original 16mm film and elements, the crowdfunding campaign used to finance the restoration, the digital restoration process, and talk about the premiere of the new and improved film in Athens, Georgia for its 40th anniversary.

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4:30 PM – 5:30 PM
White Models: A Three-Dimensional Concern

• Hunter Aarniokoski, PRO-TEK Vaults
• Holly McGee, Warner Bros Discovery

Preserving a century of any material is no simple task. Over time, mediums change and standards change, creating a diverse collection that requires careful planning and many well-defined processes. While many physical art assets are effectively flat, from sketches to storyboards to posters and prints, some are three-dimensional. One such subset of this collection is white models. Frequently constructed from 1/4″ foam board, these representations of larger 3D objects and spaces are increasingly delicate pieces of production art that require extra care in handling and digitally documenting. This session explores the specific problems faced in stewarding these meticulously crafted objects for future use and appreciation, and details how we are creating digital reference files that capture their three dimensional characteristics. Warner Bros Warner Bros is undertaking the massive project of digitally preserving 100+ years of production art assets with the help of PRO-TEK Vaults.

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4:30 PM – 5:30 PM
Who Knew?: What Became of Pittsburgh’s WRS Collection?

• Oscar Becher, Vinegar Syndrome
• Steven Haines, Pittsburgh Sound + Image
• Sandra Schulberg, IndieCollect

In 2008, Pittsburgh-based Film Laboratory WRS, was shut down for good, leaving countless film materials from all over the world unaccounted for — what happened to the countless film elements left behind after WRS was no more?  This panel aims to share the unlikely story of the rescue and preservation of this remarkable collection as well as introduce some key figures who continue to preserve the past, present, and future of the legendary Pittsburgh laboratory’s invaluable film holdings and film culture of the steel city.

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7:00 PM – Seating is limited
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) is often, and deservedly, recognized as the supreme achievement of the silent era cinema—and of all the eras that followed. For nearly one hundred years, critics, historians, scholars, and film lovers have recognized its artistry, emotion, and technical brilliance. The film’s excellence was recognized for Unique and Artistic Production at the first Academy Award ceremony, and the latest BFI Sight and Sound poll ranks Sunrise as #11 on its list of Greatest Films of All Time.

The great pioneer of German Expressionism (Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror [1922], The Last Laugh [1924], Faust [1926]), Murnau came to Hollywood in 1927 where William Fox provided budgetary and artistic carte blanche to create a cinematic masterpiece. Working with master cinematographers Charles Rosher and Karl Struss, Murnau’s fluid tracking shots, superimpositions, and symbolic use of light helped redefine what film language could accomplish, achieving a level of visual storytelling that required no dialogue to communicate its eternal themes of guilt, forgiveness, and renewal. With Sunrise’s centenary nearing on the horizon, what better time to celebrate Murnau’s masterpiece with a renewal of its own.

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10:00 PM – Seating is limited
Flashdance

• Jeff McCarty, Paramount Pictures

As AMIA gathers in Pittsburgh this year, attendees have a unique opportunity to revisit one of the city’s most famous cinematic landmarks. This special screening presents a brand-new restoration of Flashdance (1983), sourced from the original camera negative and archival film elements and designed to preserve the film’s distinctive visual style for modern audiences.  The presentation will also feature a newly created 5.1 surround remix produced directly from the film’s original music masters and soundtrack materials. For a movie whose identity is inseparable from its music, the result offers an exceptional theatrical experience, bringing new depth and clarity to songs such as “Flashdance… What a Feeling,” “Maniac,” and “Gloria.”  Part Pittsburgh celebration and part restoration showcase, this screening offers attendees the chance to experience a beloved classic in the city where its story unfolds, highlighting the power of preservation to keep iconic films vibrant for new generations.

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9:30 AM – 10:00 AM
Archiving Forty Years of Experimental Dance: Challenges and Triumphs

• Benja Thompson, New Dance Alliance
• Karen Bernard, New Dance Alliance

This presentation will report on the progress and challenges of the New Dance Alliance (NDA) archive project. Founded by Karen Bernard, NDA presents experimental performance programs in New York City, and its archive contains over forty years of work by over one thousand artists. The archive project focuses on digitizing audiovisual material and placing an archival donation to a larger institution. Preserving the history of NDA provides a long-term home for generations of dance artists, and the challenges facing this project can serve as a case study for the difficulties sweeping the archival landscape. Namely, finding sustainable methods of self-hosting and storage in the face of constricting development policies.

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9:30 AM – 10:30 AM
“Radical Troublemakers” and “Berkeley Stuff”: Revisiting California Newsreel in 2026

• Greta Snider, San Francisco State University
• Courtney Fellion, San Jose State University
• Kate Dollenmayer, Independent

This panel will explore recent archival efforts in the San Francisco Bay Area to promote access and awareness of the prescient late sixties films of the California Newsreel collective. More than fifty years later, students and workers are still coming together in solidarity against state violence, environmental racism, corporate and governmental suppression of labor organizing, and a need for more diverse representation in politics, media, and education. Given this climate, a renewed surge of interest in the history of radical grassroots media-making and distribution models provides a compelling reason to revisit these films, draw connections to today’s struggles, and expand the conversation about how we preserve and share these histories.

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10:00 AM – 10:30 AM
HDR Uncovered: What It’s About, Why It Matters in Filmscanning

• Michael Schneider, Digital Film Technology DFT

HDR is a technical term that has evolved to encompass a wide range of meanings over the past two decades. While this broader usage reflects its growing relevance, it has also led to substantial confusion, particularly in recent years.      In film scanning, HDR technology has been used since quite some time. Unlike HDR displays (which provide increased brightness), HDR in film scanning is focused on reproducing the information already recorded on the film across its entire density range.      By emphasizing practical applications rather than technical jargon, the presentation seeks to make the subject understandable and relevant for both technical and non-technical audiences. The presentation is not intended to be a highly technical deep dive, the key objective is to improve communication and collaboration between different departments by establishing a shared understanding of HDR, its terminology, capabilities, and common use cases in film digitization and preservation workflows.

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11:00 AM – 11:30 AM
The Past, Present, and Future of the Lesbian Herstory Archives’ Film Collection

• Elizabeth M. Lynch Sullivan, Lesbian Herstory Archives

The Past, Present, and Future of the Lesbian Herstory Archives’ Film Collection          This research and preservation project focuses on a collection of a previously unprocessed 16mm film from the Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA), located in Brooklyn, NY. Housed in eleven footlong boxes, this collection contains distribution prints and outtakes belonging to a number of women- and Lesbian-made films from the 1970s and 1980s. This presentation is meant to highlight a collection of films stewarded by a Lesbian- and volunteer-run community archive, the content and provenance of the collection, and how replicable this work can be for other small organizations like LHA. Additionally, this presentation will outline how LHA will move forward with this collection, and how it can be a leader amongst community-lead archives in responsibly stewarding new donations of analog film into the future.

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11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Archival Practice on GenAI and Authentication and Access

• Patricia Aufderheide, American University
• Williams Cole, independent
• Brian Real, University of Kentucky

How are archivists thinking about the challenges of authenticating and maintaining integrity of their holdings in the era of genAI?  What standards for doing so are evolving? This session presents results of two  recent research projects on the topic. The first, by Patricia Aufderheide (American University) and  William Cole with several other contributors, draws from interviews with archivists at 22 archives in the US  and UK. The second, by Brian Real (University of Kentucky), draws from AMIA Salary and Demographic Survey responses related to genAI standards and practices. Archivists generally demonstrate wariness and concern about the future of genAI, as it affects trust in their holdings, their business models, and their own jobs. They participate in standards setting grounded in mission-based behaviors, and are watchful about technical authentication.

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11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Collaborative Futures: Grassroots Strategies for AV Preservation

• Elizabeth Hansen, Texas Archive of the Moving Image
• Libby Hopfauf, Moving Image Preservation of Puget Sound (MIPoPS)/Seattle Municipal Archives
• Chris Castro, BAVC Media
• Pamela Vadakan, California Revealed
• Moriah Ulinskas, Community Archiving Workshop

This roundtable brings together regional AV preservation programs and emerging preservation networks to discuss how we can share resources and sustain our work in a post-DOGE landscape. The Spring 2025 decimation of federal funding left organizations of all sizes reeling — and its impact reaches beyond direct grantees. State humanities councils, state libraries, and regional arts councils, which regrant to smaller projects, received a bulk of their funding from federal agencies. Without these regranting programs, regional funding pools have shrunk, decreasing support for cultural heritage projects and removing local agency in cultural production. Small organizations and grassroots AV preservationists are stepping up to fill the gap. Facilitated by members of BAVC Media, California Revealed, CAW Collective, MIPoPS, and TAMI, this session invites participants to explore alternative models of business and governance, cooperative and aggregator models, new revenue streams, and the evolving role of small organizations in the audiovisual preservation landscape.

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11:30 AM – 12:00 PM
Private Visions? Gay Home Movies and Amateur Filmmaking before Stonewall

• Hugo Ljungbäck, University of Chicago

Home movies and amateur films shot by gay men serve as unique historical records, documenting queer life, community, and perseverance at mid-century, and testifying to the vibrant, fulfilling, and creative lives these men lived in the face of social rejection and legal prosecution. This presentation will survey several gay amateur filmmakers—including Harold T. O’Neal, François Reichenbach, and Jerett Robert Austin—and their unique strategies of self-representation at mid-century. At a time when the few images of queer people represented in cinema were at best pitiful and at worst derogatory, false, and downright offensive, amateur and home moviemaking allowed gay men to envision, self-fashion, and produce positive and self-affirming images of themselves on screen. But as I argue, for gay men, filmmaking was not merely a means of creative expression; it was also a social practice that brought friends and communities together as a public in their own collective self-fashioning.

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12:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Poster: A New Guide on Archiving Video for Human Rights

• Yvonne Ng, WITNESS

This poster provides an overview of new online guidance published by WITNESS on human rights video archiving, aimed at practitioners engaged in audiovisual human rights documentation, preservation, and investigation. An update to our previous award-winning Activists’ Guide to Archiving Video, this new guidance shares approaches that are practical for lower resourced and high security contexts, and that respond to a new trust landscape brought about generative AI and AI manipulation.

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12:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Poster: Brigham Young University

• Michael Gates, Brigham Young University

All archives face—or soon will face—the problem of dwindling space. How relevant can an archive be for its patrons if it cannot continue collecting new material? How useful is an object on the shelf that can no longer be or has already been digitized?  Magnetic carriers are actively degrading, playback machines are disappearing, and the expertise to maintain them is vanishing.  This poster represents the voices of all stakeholders in audiovisual preservation—curators, the AV archivist, the digitization lab, archival processors, and digital preservation—through a collaborative workflow developed at BYU. The process emphasizes appraisal/reappraisal, complete digitization and digital preservation aligned with LOCKSS principles.  A key outcome is the option to responsibly discard media once it is fully preserved, while maintaining curatorial discretion to retain items with artifactual or intrinsic value. Additionally, we recognize that digitized and discarded media is no longer at risk of loss by disaster.

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12:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Poster: Community Description: Enhancing Audiovisual Collections for Outreach and Collaboration

• Ricardo Ceballos, Washington University in St. Louis

In 2023, Washington University in St. Louis Libraries was gifted the collection of Dr. Robert C. Johnson III, a social work graduate student active in Black student and local community groups from 1970 to 1972. Composed of 22 8mm reels, they depict events and gatherings hosted and attended by the WashU Association of Black Collegians members (ABC.) A significant portion of the people and places shown could not be positively identified. To enhance their archival value and highlight audiovisual preservation, WashU developed a collaborative digital outreach project using the materials. The films were digitized and curated into an online exhibit featuring clips and descriptions of the collection. Along with the exhibit, a form was created for ABC alumni to contribute names, places, and memories as context for the collection. This poster presents the development of this project and the potential use for future identification projects utilizing home movies.

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12:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Poster: Digital Preservation for Independent Filmmakers: Bridging the Knowledge Gap

• Meg Koleck, University of Alabama

Independent filmmakers are not preserving their own projects because they do not have access to the preservation toolkits that circulate freely within the archival community. Born-digital material is not slowing down, and we can take immediate action to stay on top of the digital boom by making our resources accessible to independent filmmakers. Narrowing the digital preservation knowledge gap is possible and will result in the greater longevity of independent films and stronger ties between the professions.

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12:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Poster: Situating the Tape Era Video Facility: A 1970s Post-Production History

• Paul Dougherty, Post Literate Productions

Commercial video facilities of the 1970s produced vast quantities of broadcast, advertising, and industrial content – yet their operational histories are nearly absent from archival literature. This poster draws on firsthand experience and a recently surfaced photo archive to document life inside Unitel, a major New York City post-production facility, during the transition from 2″ quad to 1″ videotape. The presenter worked at Unitel from 1976–1980 and later freelanced at some 40 facilities before pivoting to video preservation. Key themes include the heavy engineering infrastructure these facilities required, the complexity of analog special effects workflows, and what that means for preservation and restoration of surviving materials. The project is in early development and the poster session is an opportunity to connect with others who share knowledge of or interest in this underrepresented chapter of media history.

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12:30 PM – 1:30 PM
Screening Session: A Litany for Survival: the Life and Work of Audre Lorde

• JT Takagi, Third World Newsreel
• Ada Gay Griffin, Independent filmmaker
• Draye Wilson, Third World Newsreel, Electronic Arts Intermix

Recently restored, A Litany for Survival: the Life and Work of Audre Lorde is a documentary about the iconic Black poet, lesbian, mother, educator and activist. Screening at Sundance in 1995, it was restored in 2025. The film explores a life and body of work that embodies connections between the Civil Rights movement, Women’s movement, and the struggle for LGBTQ rights.  We will screen 40 minutes of the film, followed by director Ada Gay Griffin and TWN director JT Takagi and Archival Coordinator Draye Wilson talking about the production and preservation. Preservation becomes resistance when forgetting is policy. Preservation is a necessity for People of color and LGBTQIA+ communities facing escalating state-violence. As thousands of books have been banned and hundreds of DEI programs dismantled, what we protect now determines how future generations will know what happened, who we were, and how we survived.

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12:30 PM – 1:30 PM
Screening Session: Access to Oral Histories: A Case Study

• Jenni Matz, Television Academy Foundation
• Zack Ellis, TheirStory

The Television Academy Foundation Interviews is approaching its 30th anniversary in 2027. In looking for ways to tell the story of our stories, the collection stewards went back to the founders and original staff for the collection to establish the institutional history of the archive. To save on expenses and time, staff utilized TheirStory to capture remote interviews, transcribe them, and create a robust index of topics and clips. A public-facing access tool was put together, with the ability to quickly and easily add more stories as they are collected over the next year. This screening session will detail the tools and infrastructure used to both capture visual histories and provide access to search and explore them with a demo of the site created for this in-the-works project.

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12:30 PM – 1:30 PM
Screening Session: Beyond PowerPoint: Documenting 1970s and 1980s Corporate Multi-Image Slideshows

• Zachary Vanes, University of Iowa
• Steve Michelsen, Independent Archivist

This screening session will feature new video documentation of restored multi-image slideshows that were created for corporate meetings during the 1970s and 1980s. Often using over fifteen carousel 35mm slide projectors and a high-definition soundtrack synchronized through a computerized device, multi-image presentations were World’s-Fair-style spectacles intended to entertain clients, motivate workers, and introduce products. Multi-image shows often took the form of panoramic mosaics punctuated by optical effects achieved through laborious animation stand work. The screening program will showcase the variety of tasks that multi-image performed at late-20th century meetings and conventions: dispensing new age wisdom, announcing coffee breaks, honoring top-performing employees, and addressing concerns about precarious economic conditions. In the contemporary moment, when nearly every public speech is accompanied by some form of slideshow software, these multi-image presentations reveal a time when meetings assumed a far more dynamic mode of address.

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2:00 PM – 2:30 PM
Pleasant Nightmares: Horror Hosts and the Collective Experience of Broadcast Terror

• Jimi Jones, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

This presentation explores the history and preservation of television horror hosts, from Vampira and Ghoulardi to Svengoolie and Joe Bob Briggs. Once fixtures of local late-night television, horror hosts introduced films, performed comic interludes, and created communal viewing experiences tied to specific regional broadcast cultures.  Because much early local television was never preserved—or was erased, discarded, or recorded over—many horror host broadcasts now survive only through fan-made off-air recordings and collector networks. This presentation examines how fans became informal audiovisual archivists, preserving not only broadcasts themselves but also commercials, station identifications, and other contextual traces of local television history.  Drawing on media archaeology, archival theory, and interviews with contemporary horror hosts, the presentation argues that horror host recordings preserve the social experience of broadcast television as much as the films themselves, revealing how audiences maintain moving image culture outside traditional archival institutions.

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2:00 PM – 3:00 PM
Collaborative Preservation Networks: Building Principled Partnerships with Private Collectors

• Shawn VanCour, New York University
• Owen Gottlieb, Rochester Institute of Technology
• Felèsha Love, Black Women in Radio
• Marley Saldivar-Lozano, University of California, Los Angeles

This panel explores case studies of collaborative projects between private collectors and formal archiving institutions to recover and preserve commercial, local, and educational broadcasting content from across the U.S., Canada, and UK. Offering perspectives of AV preservation professionals, citizen archivists, and educators who have participated in or facilitated these projects, panelists discuss joint preservation efforts between private collectors and the National Recording Preservation Board, Black Women in Radio’s work with government and university libraries preserving collections of cultural creators, fan-led preservations of British, U.S. & Canadian television conducted in collaboration with state broadcasters and academics, and UCLA Film and Television’s work with local communities to preserve LA-area Chicanx public affairs programming. Issues addressed include outreach strategies; intellectual property and privacy rights; participatory description practices; content discoverability and ethics of access; community activations of preserved content; knowledge-sharing and shared decision-making; and sustainability of human and technological infrastructures.

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2:00 PM – 3:00 PM
Copyright, Archival Fair Use, and GenAI Today: Legal Perspectives

• Patricia Aufderheide, American University
• Jenni Matz, Academy of Television Arts & Sciences
• Michael Madison, University of Pittsburgh
• Brandon Butler, Jaszi & Butler

Two legal experts will summarize the state of copyright law in relation to genAI,  among other things addressing scraping, fair use and genAI. Your questions  are welcome, both beforehand, to matz@televisionacademy.com or at the se

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2:00 PM – 3:00 PM
Salvage to Spotlight: Highlighting Neglected Labor Film Collections

• Rosemarie Fettig, University of Maryland
• Mark Coulbourne, University of Maryland
• Jenny Schollaert, University of Maryland

When rapidly deteriorating environmental conditions in an aging storage space threatened the AFL-CIO film collections in the University of Maryland Libraries, a project that had been postponed for nearly a decade kicked into high gear. Staff from the Preservation, Access, and Instruction & Outreach teams will share their cross-team collaboration to evacuate the collections on short notice, find a more stable storage solution, execute an unprecedented processing project, and experiment with new outreach strategies to bring thousands of underdocumented items into the spotlight. The relocated collection includes film, video, and audio recordings produced by labor organizations from 1950-2010, many of which are unique, with no additional copies remaining, making this project all the more critical. Part process overview and part project survival strategy, this panel aims to explore the benefits of cross-unit collaboration as a means of banding together to foster resilience in times of institutional instability.

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2:30 PM – 2:45 PM
Bill Viola Video Preservation Project at the George Eastman Museum

• Ethan Lewis, Selznick School of Film Preservation, Class of 2026
• Gordon Nelson, George Eastman Museum

The Bill Viola collection is a recent acquisition of video art at the George Eastman Museum (GEM). In collaboration with the Bill Viola Studio, GEM is moving through a multi-year process to digitize master tape content provided by the studio, expanding upon the existing tape capture processes at GEM to make them more attuned to the unique needs of video art. This session will cover progress from the first year of the collaboration to generate preservation-level digital files for use in future exhibitions. The collaborative process with the studio and the involvement of the students from the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film preservation will be core components of the discussion about the first year of this project.

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3:15 PM – 3:45 PM
Required Images: Archival Closure in Digital Restoration Practices

• Elise Schierbeek, San Francisco Film Preserve

This session presents a hybrid historiography and critical theory of machine learning tools used for video upscaling and digital restoration, in order to outline restorationists’ changing attitudes toward these technologies over time and to examine various impulses toward closure in film/video restoration practices today. As streaming platforms implement automatic upscaling, as hobbyists use AI tools to output naive HD “restoration,” as artists AI-upscale their own works to meet 4K pixel-count distribution standards and beyond, and as studios liberally apply AI tools to official restorations, our collective understanding of moving image materiality is disintegrating. This presentation will revisit traditional questions about how we deal with gaps in footage at the level of narrative wholes, individual frames, and constituent pixels. The presentation will outline ways in which the San Francisco Film Preserve navigates their own quest for closure when reconstructing missing fragments.

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3:15 PM – 4:15 PM
Finding Gugusse: Discovering, Restoring, and Sharing a Lost Méliès Film

• Courtney Holschuh, Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center
• Heather Linville, Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center
• Jason Evans Groth, Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center
• Patrick Queen, Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center
• Jason McNeal, Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center

In September 2025, Bill and Mary McFarland drove over 700 miles from their home in Michigan to the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia to hand deliver a literal treasure chest containing reels of old nitrate film. The films had belonged to McFarland’s great grandfather, William DeLyle Frisbee, farmer by day and wandering showman by night. Among those films was certainly a treasure – Gugusse and the Automaton, an 1897 film by Georges Méliès that features the first on-screen appearance of a robot. This 39 second piece of history was scanned, digitally restored and shared via the Library of Congress National Screening Room and garnered international attention.  In this panel, Library of Congress staff will discuss the story of discovering, scanning, and sharing Gugusse and the Automaton, all while highlighting the archival process from acquisition to access.

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3:15 PM – 4:15 PM
Who Controls the Algorithm? AI, Ethics, and Audiovisual Memory

• Dr. Katrina Fenlon, University of Maryland
• Jimi Jones, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
• Piotr Adamczyk
• Jesse Johnston, University of Michigan

Artificial intelligence is transforming how archives transcribe, describe, and provide access to audiovisual collections—but who controls the algorithms shaping public memory? This forum brings together four practitioners and researchers to examine the ethical challenges of archival AI. Brief provocations address archival sovereignty and metadata as power; privacy-preserving AI architectures that keep sensitive collections under institutional control; the values embedded in audiovisual preservation standards and metadata infrastructures; and the ways AI systems can influence reference interactions and shape user requests. The session then opens to a facilitated audience discussion focused on practical concerns, including machine-generated metadata, community consent, algorithmic surveillance, and vendor accountability. Whether evaluating AI tools, negotiating contracts, or managing audiovisual collections, attendees will gain actionable strategies for navigating the intersection of emerging technologies, preservation practice, and public trust.

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3:45 PM – 4:15 PM
A Century of Sound – Part 3 Preview

• Robert Heiber, The Rick Chace Foundation
• Brian Vessa

Sound has transformed the art form of 20th Century – motion pictures. The three-part series, A Century of Sound, The History of Sound in Motion Pictures, comprehensively documents this amazing transformation with expert presentations from world-renown presenters.  The newest edition, Part 3, contains two programs: SMPTE Engineering Director Motion Pictures, Oscar Recipient and Senior VP Dolby Laboratories’ Ioan Allen’s lecture  – Eight Decades of Optical Stereo and Sony Pictures’ Restoration/Remixing Engineer and SMPTE committee chair Brian Vessa’s presentation, The New Frontier: How Digital Cinema Changed the Sound of Movies.  Eight Decades traces the development of optical stereo sound for motion pictures, with the quest for better fidelity and a single inventory print playable in any theater with the same quality of sound.  The New Frontier explores the transition from analog to digital, and the sonic impacts that digital cinema had on the movie going experience. Immersive Audio, with its added dimension of height and use of audio objects, has raised the sonic bar. This created a new quest to once again achieve a single inventory print.  At the conclusion of the presentation, attendees will be encouraged to register for the free-of-charge discs.

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4:30 PM – 4:45 PM
Breaking Out the B-Roll: Accessing KAIT-8 News of Northeast Arkansas

• Caetlyn Elder, Arkansas State University

The KAIT-8 News Collection is one of the largest collections at Arkansas State University, consisting of over a thousand hours of unaired b-roll footage from rural Northeast Arkansas in the late seventies. This presentation will provide a progress update on the processing workflow while showcasing this invaluable regional broadcast collection. The presenter will discuss challenges she has encountered while processing the collection, such as the implementation of AI transcription tools and emphasizing collection accessibility through mandated ADA standards during processing. Attendees will gain insight into the unique issues archivists address when processing a regional collection, as well as the resources professionals use to support accessibility while being provided with collection highlights.

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4:30 PM – 5:00 PM
Archives in the Age of AI: A Case Study on “Rebelles”

• Renée de Sousa, Space Pirates
• Celeste Mackenzie, Independent Archives Producer
• Marika Lapointe (moderator), Independent Archives Producer

What does an archives producer actually do on a show where almost everything you see was made by AI?  Rebelles, a documentary series celebrating trailblazing Canadian women, built its visual world almost entirely through generative tools. And yet, at every stage of production, an archives producer was at the table.  Through an open conversation between the show’s producer and its archives producer, we’ll walk through the full workflow: the deep archival research that grounds every episode, the ethical licensing framework, and the transparency strategies that keep audiences oriented between the historical and the generated.  We’ll talk honestly about what worked, what was contested, and what surprised us.  If you’re grappling with where archival expertise fits in an AI-driven production landscape, this session was designed for you.

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4:30 PM – 5:00 PM
Home Movies of Migration as Vehicles for Eliciting Oral Testimony

• Daniel Melfi, Università di Pisa

Daniel Melfi is researching the use of home movies as vehicles for eliciting oral testimony and recording oral history. The goal of this research is to generate cross-generational testimony and record a grassroots oral history of Italy’s wave of post-WWII immigration to Canada and the US. It employs the home movies of Italian immigrants—preserved at the Fondazione Home Movies in Bologna—as visual interview stimulus. In the development of this project, a detailed and expandable protocol was developed for Film-Elicitation-Interviews (FEI), which builds on the notion of Photo-Elicitation-Interviews (PEI) in visual anthropology. This project links together the concepts of filming history “from below” as proposed by film scholar Efrén Cuevas and “microhistory” as pioneered by Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg; it stiches a fabric of social history, spliced of fragments of immigrant life captured on small-gauge film from the 1940s until the 1980s, in both Italy and North America.

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4:30 PM – 5:30 PM
Preservation as Resistance

• JT Takagi, Third World Newsreel
• Ada Gay Griffin, Independent Filmmaker
• Draye Wilson, Third World Newsreel, Electronic Arts Intermix

Third World Newsreel (TWN) has been preserving its collection of 16mm films dating back to 1968. This presentation would highlight three recent film restoration projects, MISSISSIPPI TRIANGLE (1983) A LITANY FOR SURVIVAL: THE LIFE AND WORK OF AUDRE LORDE (1995) and FROM SPIKES TO SPINDLES (1976). The panel will talk about the overall preservation effort, the specific technical work involved, and the broader context of fighting erasure.  We would show clips from the films, and feature Ada Gay Griffin, the director of LITANY, JT Takagi, Third World Newsreel ED and Draye Wilson, TWN archival coordinator. Preservation becomes resistance when forgetting is policy. Preservation is a necessity for People of color and LGBTQIA+ communities facing escalating state-violence. As thousands of books have been banned and hundreds of DEI programs dismantled, what we protect now determines how future generations will know what happened, who we were, and how we survived.

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4:45 PM – 5:00 PM
Activating a Community Television Archive: The Toxteth TV Project

• Monika Rodriguez, Toxteth TV Archive (Project Lead)

The Toxteth TV Archive is a community-led moving image archive based in Liverpool, UK, working to preserve and activate local audiovisual heritage through community participation. Building on the legacy of Toxteth TV as a local television and media initiative, the project brings together videotape, digital video, and other moving image materials alongside the memories and knowledge of local residents.  This session explores how community-based audiovisual archives can become active spaces for interpretation, dialogue, and collective memory-making. Through digitisation, screenings, and participatory activities, community members contribute to the understanding and contextualisation of archival materials, creating new opportunities for engagement with local history.  The presentation will share lessons from the archive’s early development and reflect on challenges and opportunities relating to access, stewardship, trust, and community participation in moving image archives.

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5:00 PM – 5:15 PM
Cleaning up The Kitchen with the Bulk Update Spreadsheet

• Chloe Patton, Getty Research Institute

Aligning item level physical descriptions within archival arrangements can be tricky at a large scale. Fortunately, the new bulk updater tool in ArchivesSpace supports batch updates with just a spreadsheet – presenting an opportunity to centralize generations of descriptive information. Explore a metadata enhancement pilot project with The Kitchen videos and records at the Getty Research Institute, documenting the first forty years of the NYC art space. This presentation will discuss the need for this metadata optimization, developing a new workflow, and how these efforts contribute necessary improvements for the collection user experience. The bulk spreadsheet tool can make previously difficult clean up projects feasible with a little elbow grease, allowing metadata enhancement to support access and preservation initiatives.

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5:00 PM – 5:15 PM
Finding New Homes and New Futures for Ampex Museum Artifacts

• Rebecca M. Gordon, Stanford University

In December 2025 I presented at AMIA in Baltimore on the Ray Dolby Papers and the Ampex museum pieces in Stanford storage. At this meeting I discussed my hope of being allowed to find new homes for Ampex machines that can still be put to use in magnetic media preservation. The project was greenlit by Stanford Libraries’ administrators and as of May-June 2026 I am organizing the transfer of objects long in storage (since 2001) to audiovisual preservationists, media engineers, technicians, collectors and archivists who need these machines, know their value, and can restore them. Rarely does a collection of this sort –which was never fully in-scope for Stanford Libraries—find new life through careful deaccession and dispersal.  This presentation will update the AMIA community on this project and share which entities or organizations have adopted which elements of the Ampex Museum of Magnetic Recorded Sound that was.

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5:00 PM – 5:30 PM
MediaShield Pro: AI-Based Audio Authenticity for Sound Heritage

• Sami Meddeb, Digital Cooperation Association
• Sabrine hedhli, Digital Cooperation Association

MediaShield Pro is a sovereign and cost-efficient framework designed to protect endangered sound heritage in community and collective radio archives.  As generative AI and voice cloning become more accessible, small-scale audiovisual collections face increasing risks to their authenticity and trustworthiness. This session presents a practical approach based on “frugal innovation,” making advanced verification accessible in low-resource environments.  The workflow combines audio fingerprinting with local AI-based speech analysis to detect manipulated or synthetic audio, while ensuring full local processing and data sovereignty. Audio assets are then secured using C2PA standards to provide verifiable provenance and reinforce trust.  By demonstrating that high-level audio verification can be deployed on standard hardware without reliance on cloud infrastructure, this proposal introduces a sustainable and autonomous model for digital preservation in the age of synthetic media.

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5:15 PM – 5:30 PM
¡HABLADA EN ESPAÑOL! Bringing Hollywood’s Spanish-Language Cinema to New Audiences Through Preservation and Community Engagement

• Alejandra Espasande,

¡HABLADA EN ESPAÑOL! Bringing Hollywood’s Spanish-Language Cinema to New Audiences Through Preservation and Community Engagement Presenter: Alejandra Espasande Presentation Description This presentation examines the preservation, research, and curatorial work behind ¡HABLADA EN ESPAÑOL! The Legacy of Hollywood’s Spanish-Language Cinema (1929–1939), a gallery exhibition dedicated to recovering and sharing the history of Hollywood’s Spanish-language productions during the transition from silent film to sound. Through archival discoveries, rare photographs, film materials, and historical research, the exhibition brought the faces and stories of a largely forgotten cinema tradition to new audiences in the heart of Los Angeles’ Latino community. The presentation will discuss the process of developing the exhibition, from archival investigation and content selection to interpretive design and public programming. Particular attention will be given to the role of community engagement in activating archival collections.

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5:15 PM – 5:30 PM
Frame by Frame: “Discovery” and Restoration of a Rare 28mm Film

• Mark Coulbourne, University of Maryland
• Dino Everett, University of Southern California
• Alan Akers, UL Research Institutes
• Mark Coulbourne, University of Maryland, College Park

In 1917, Underwriters Laboratories produced a 28mm motion picture addressing the importance of industrial fire safety, using film as a persuasive educational tool at a moment when factories, insurers, engineers, and workers were increasingly focused on preventing catastrophic workplace fires. More than a century later, this rare film survives as both a historical artifact and a preservation challenge: it exists in an obsolete motion-picture format, carries evidence of its age and use, and requires specialized handling before it can be safely viewed or shared. By following the film’s journey from physical object to digital surrogate, the screening and presentation highlights the practical and interpretive questions that arise when preserving rare audiovisual materials. The project demonstrates how conserving a single film can illuminate larger stories about workplace safety, public education, technological change, and the responsibilities of archives to preserve fragile media for future research and engagement.

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7:00pm
Archival Screening Night

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8:15 AM – 9:15 AM
Keynote

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9:30 AM – 9:45 AM
Indie Filmmakers On Mourning and Creative Potential After Digital Loss

• Isabela Escalona, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

In the digital era, independent, low-budget filmmakers are on the frontlines of digital file preservation, building creative networks, and forging best practices as we go. As filmmaking and digital file storage has become increasingly computerized, monetized, and precarious, artists are pushed to find alternative solutions. In this project report, I’ll share my findings from interviews conducted with independent filmmakers on their affective experiences after losing files and the creative potential digital loss inspires; drawing on theoretical frameworks by Mary Ann Doane, Katherine Groo, Alix Beeston, and Stefan Solomon. This session’s goal is to encourage connection between archivists and independent artists as collaborators sharing similar goals of preservation and partners in considering theoretical questions regarding destruction and impermanence inherent to cinema, what one should preserve, to what lengths we will go to preserve it, and the creative potential that occurs after we may fail.

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9:30 AM – 10:30 AM
At Any Stage: Four Journeys in Disaster Recovery and Planning

• Stacey Ference, New York Public Library
• Michael Gates, Brigham Young University
• Melissa Hernandez-Duran, Bentley Historical Library – University of Michigan

This panel brings together four professionals at different stages of their careers, different institutions, and different levels of engagement with disaster and emergency recovery and management to highlight similarities and differences. From learning about institutional processes on one’s own to emergency recovery on the fly, and from mobilizing interested volunteers to creating a disaster planning template zine, this panel will touch on four different individual’s experiences with disaster planning, and provide insight and inspiration to attendees at any stage of the disaster/emergency process.

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9:30 AM – 10:30 AM
The Films and Archives of Tony Buba

• Eric Hoyt, University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Tony Buba, Independent Filmmaker
• Regina M. Longo, Archives in Motion, LLC
• Adam Lowenstein, University of Pittsburgh
• Amanda Smith, WCFTR

This dynamic session places Pittsburgh-based filmmaker Tony Buba into conversation three scholar-archivists (Eric Hoyt, Adam Lowenstein, and Regina M. Longo) to discuss Buba’s long career, rich archival collections, and the potential for further research and creative practice using his archives. Buba is an accomplished filmmaker whose work includes the award-winning documentary, Lightning Over Braddock: A Rustbowl Fantasy (1988), and collaborations with director George A. Romero on the iconic 1970s horror movies, Martin (1977) and Dawn of the Dead (1978). In this fluid session, Hoyt, Lowenstein, and Longo will each curate a clip from Buba’s work and use it to ask Buba to reflect on his approach to filmmaking and the preservation of his archives, which are preserved at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. Throughout these conversations, the participants will draw out specific threads from Buba’s career and highlight generalizable takeaways useful for other archivists, scholars, and filmmakers.

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9:45 AM – 10:00 AM
Prepare the Firehose: Preserving an Institutional YouTube account

• Andrew McDonnell, University of Kentucky Libraries

The University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center recently received a donation of 4,500+ videos in the form of the University’s primary institutional YouTube Channel. Many of the videos, particularly older files and livestreamed events, existed solely on YouTube’s servers and were scheduled to be taken down or deleted as part of a brand refresh. This project report will describe the methods used to capture and preserve the collection’s initial 5 terabytes and accompanying metadata hosted on the channel.   In addition to introducing a number of novel appraisal questions, the process of accessioning the video collection shed light on challenges surrounding cloud migrations of this scale, the sometimes infuriating nature of Google TakeOut metadata, and necessary video format remediation. This project report will share practical lessons learned along the way as well as this method’s limitations.

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10:00 AM – 10:15 AM
Upscaling Analogue Audiovisual Digitization and the Lessons Learnt

• Gordon MacPhail, National Film and Sound Archive

In 2021, the Australian Government provided the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) with AUD41.9 million in additional funding to digitize the nation’s at-risk audiovisual heritage including collections from seven other Australian National Collecting Institutions (NCIs). Digitizing these collections has unlocked Australia’s history and stories as told through screen and sound including First Nations content  helping to revitalize traditional culture and language.  The funding was pre-empted by the release of the NFSA’s Deadline 2025, report highlighting the challenges of magnetic tape deterioration and playback equipment facing obsolescence.  The presentation will cover the following:  The Challenges – upscaling and expanding; Infrastructure – Improved digital pathways; Equipment – New equipment to digitize audiovisual media; People – More people and training; Lessons Learnt – Applying lessons to maintain operations; The Future – The pressure points and how to work collaboratively with others facing the same challenges.

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10:15 AM – 10:30 AM
New York African Film Festival Archives: Strategies for Solo Archivists

• Kirk Mudle, New York African Film Festival, Inc.

This session reports on the preservation of the archives of the New York African Film Festival, Inc. (AFF). AFF is a non-profit arts organization dedicated to advancing an enhanced understanding of African culture through the cinematic arts. Through its film festival and other programming, AFF provides audiences with greater access to African films and culture. AFF’s archives consist of 3,000 film titles from over 90 countries, audiovisual documentation of festival activities and events and hundreds of film posters and photographs, and extensive printed materials and other festival records.  In addition to highlighting AFF’s collection of rarely seen and largely inaccessible audiovisual materials, this report will share lessons learned while working as solo archivist with limited field experience and resources. I will discuss the challenges of working in a small arts non-profit, confronting gaps in my knowledge being hired fresh out of graduate school, building systems from scratch, and share the strategies that I used to establish priorities, workflows, and “good enough” practices in a dynamic office environment with conflicting demands.

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11:00 AM – 11:30 AM
Preserving Public Media at Scale, For Viewers Like You

• Karen Cariani, GBH and American Archive of Public Broadcasting
• Rebecca Fraimow, GBH
• Rochelle Miller, GBH
• Owen King, GBH
• Miranda Villesvik, GBH

How do we move the preservation of local broadcasting from theoretical discussion to execution at scale? For 13 years, the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB)—a historic collaboration between GBH and the Library of Congress—has tackled this challenge head-on, successfully preserving and providing access to over 340,000 public television and radio items nationwide. As the initiative concludes its landmark Mellon Foundation grant, AAPB staff offer a candid, behind-the-scenes look at the realities of managing a massive, multi-institutional project. This session distills over a decade of lessons learned, covering practical archival workflows, complex project management, and effective strategies for collaborating with material-providing stations and vendors. Panelists will also highlight proven audience-building outreach efforts and debut a cutting-edge AI cataloging tool developed with the Brandeis Department of Computational Linguistics. Attendees will leave with actionable insights to apply to their own large-scale preservation, outreach, and metadata initiatives.

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11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Dolby Vision: Remastering for Classic MGM Titles

• Ashley Franks-McGill, Duplitech
• Darren Gross, Prime Video & Amazon MGM Studios
• Scott Grossman, Amazon MGM Studios
• Steven Johnson, Duplitech
• Gary Teetzel, Amazon MGM Studios

Join industry leaders from Duplitech and Amazon MGM Studios for a deep dive into applying Dolby Vision technology to historic studio catalogs. This session explores the technical workflows, color-grading considerations, and archival ethics involved in bringing classic films into high-dynamic-range formats. Speakers will present detailed case studies of recently remastered MGM titles to highlight how HDR techniques can expand contrast and color gamuts while faithfully preserving original artistic intent. Attendees will gain actionable insights into how archives and post-production facilities can collaborate to revitalize legacy motion pictures for modern display standards.

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11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
The Sing Lee Theatre and Chinese Language Cinema in L.A.

• Staci Hogsett, UCLA Film & Television Archive
• Todd Wiener, UCLA Film & TV Archive
• Janet Louie

In 2016, the UCLA Film & Television Archive was approached by a commercial real estate developer to take in a collection of over 500 Chinese-language film prints from the abandoned Sing Lee Theatre. Opened in 1962, the Sing Lee Theatre became a cornerstone of Los Angeles’ Chinatown’s cultural life — first as a venue for live Cantonese opera featuring visiting Hong Kong stars, and later as a hub for Chinese-language cinema. Serving the city’s rapidly growing Chinese American community, the theater provided a vital community gathering place. After 10 years, the Archive completed processing and hosting a screening series featuring prints from the collection. Archive staff Todd Wiener and Staci Hogsett, along with former Archive colleague and co-programmer Janet Louie, will present on the history of the theater, the importance of the collection, and its unique access and preservation challenges.

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11:30 AM – 12:00 PM
Who’s in our News? Surfacing the Individuals in Television Archives

• Owen King, GBH Archives
• Kaycee Alice Conover, GBH Archives
• Emily Hankins, GBH Archives

This session will explore uncertainties and prospects for using AI in video cataloging, presenting a novel data workflow where AI systems surface scenes while humans examine the individual people identified by on-screen text.  Our project focused on television news archives, which feature national figures, local leaders, and people known primarily by those in their own lives.  We sought to identify, acknowledge, and highlight the individuals in each episode. Our data pipeline uses AI models for finding and extracting on-screen text, along with an interface for human review and correction.  The pipeline and workflow were iteratively improved through dialogue concerning accuracy, efficiency, and curiosity in collection stewardship. Through the project, we identified notable individuals, including two influential female news anchors, and used archives data as sources for Wikipedia entries about them.  We anticipate this tooling and the associated metadata workflow will be useful for processing work in other television archives.

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12:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Poster: DPOE-N: Financial and Educational Resources for Archivists and Program Findings

• Kirk Mudle, Digital Preservation Outreach and Education Network

Digital Preservation Outreach & Education Network (DPOE-N) is a joint initiative between Pratt Institute School of Information and New York University’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program. Since 2020, DPOE-N has made an impact on digital preservation training and education in the U.S. DPOE-N has awarded a total of $438,159 to 291 professionals representing 44 states, Puerto Rico, and the Northern Mariana Islands. These professional development microgrants allowed archive, library, and museum professionals to enroll in digital preservation training programs. DPOE-N has also organized 30 free virtual workshops covering a wide range of both technical and human resource digital preservation topics, such as preservation metadata, disaster planning, emulation, web archiving, and many others. Through a collaboration with the University of Puerto Rico and UPR Caribe Digital, DPOE-N has hosted five in-person workshops at the UPR Río Piedras campus on topics including the preservation of social media AV objects, oral histories, among others. This poster reports on the accomplishments and lessons learned from the first five years of DPOE-N, including the most commonly requested digital preservation instruction topics, what the demand for training topics indicates about the state of digital preservation training in the U.S., insights from surveys of past microgrant recipients, and our plans for the future.

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12:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Poster: Preserving Brixner: Preservation & Access of Unseen Manhattan Project Footage

• MiriYam Elanor Judd, Los Alamos National Laboratory
• Patty Templeton, Los Alamos National Laboratory

As optical engineer and head photographer for the Manhattan Project, Berlyn Brixner created motion picture films now held in the archival collections at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Recently rediscovered among Brixner’s mixed-media collection was a box of films showing never-before-seen clips of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, General Leslie Groves, the Women’s Army Corps, and the aftermath of the Trinity explosion – the world’s first detonation of an atomic device. The films were in varying stages when discovered, ranging from stable to the beginning symptoms of vinegar syndrome to those that crumbled when handled. This poster seeks to walk viewers through the steps taken to preserve these films and make them accessible to Laboratory researchers and the public.

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12:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Poster: Santa Fe Bound: Solving the Mystery of Jeannine Drolet

• Lindsay Miller, Vinegar Syndrome

In September 1972, a Newsweek feature detailing the inaugural year of Amtrak profiled Jeannine Drolet. While traveling, Drolet is quoted saying, “Now, I’m off for Santa Fe, and I hear that’s a fantastic train to take.” What the Newsweek article doesn’t mention is that Drolet had previously directed a 30-minute short film titled “Santa Fe Bound”, which likely served as the inspiration for this trip.  “Santa Fe Bound” re-emerged in 2024 when an answer print was identified within the archives of Vinegar Syndrome. This find sparked an investigation into Drolet’s life, uncovering her connections to San Francisco’s LGBTQ community and her involvement in the 1970s adult film scene, specifically her work with “playboy pornographer” Lloyd Downton.   This poster examines Santa Fe Bound, the overlap between Drolet and Downton’s careers, and the ethical considerations involved in archiving one’s personal pornography.

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12:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Poster: Teaching Film Archiving: A Renewed Excitement for Analog Media

• Eli Vannata, George Eastman Museum

In a time where Gen Z and Gen Alpha seem fated to be consumed by the contemporary digital age, teaching middle school and high school students about film archiving has revealed the way in which these younger generations interact with analog mediums as a rejection of their destiny. This included classes on physical film practice and theory, critical film viewing, and experimental 16mm filmmaking. These classes provide a way for students to think about how they interact with digital and analog media and how their role as archivists can be relevant to contemporary culture. Even during a time that seems doomed, these students demonstrate how film archiving is all about learning, community, memory, and perseverance.

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12:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Poster: The Slow Film Movement: Echo Park Film Center records at the Getty Research Institute

• Guadalupe Rodriguez, Getty Research Institute

The Echo Park Film Center (EPFC) records at the Getty Research Institute (GRI) document the twenty-year history of the artist-run nonprofit organization that provided an alternative space for community workshops, screenings, resources, and residencies in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. With the goal of increasing media access for the community, EPFC organized approximately 4,000 events over its twenty-year history, beginning in 2001. A pillar of the Echo Park community, EPFC became a creative space for all ages, promoting perspectives outside of traditional Hollywood storytelling. With the addition of these records, the GRI has expanded its collections documenting the rise of a new wave of experimental arts organizations in the Los Angeles area.

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12:30 PM – 1:30 PM
Beyond Digitization: Latinx Home Movies, Community Memory, and the Future We Are Preserving

• Mayra Isabel Garza, California Revealed
• Kate Dollenmayer

Home movies preserve dimensions of memory, identity, and community life that are often absent from institutional archives. Through curated selections from newly digitized Latinx home movies, this screening session explores how moving images expand historical narratives that have frequently reduced communities of color to stories of migration, labor, hardship, or political struggle. Families gathered in backyards, celebrations shared across generations, and moments of everyday joy offer a fuller understanding of the people, relationships, and communities that shaped these histories.  Using orphan films as a starting point, the session examines what responsibilities emerge once these materials have been preserved. Through film clips and discussion, attendees will explore questions of description, access, community engagement, and stewardship while considering how archives can move beyond preservation as an endpoint toward more meaningful relationships with the communities whose histories they hold.

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12:30 PM – 1:30 PM
Discover Pittsburgh’s Jazz Legacy – We Knew What We Had – Documentary

• Mark Jackovic, MCG Jazz
• Marty Ashby, MCG Jazz
• Roger Humphries, Pittsburgh Jazz Legend
• Dwayne Dolphin, Pittsburgh Jazz Legend

We Knew What We Had: The Greatest Jazz Story Never Told is a documentary film that explores the social conditions and historical events that coalesced to make Pittsburgh one of the leading contributors to the legacy of jazz music in the world.  The film is packed with compelling interviews, historical photographs, and over 20 live performance clips including George Benson, Ahmad Jamal, Stanley Turrentine, Billy Eckstine, Kenny Clarke, Art Blakey, Billy Strayhorn, Mary Lou Williams, and more – all Pittsburghers.  The film was produced for a general audience, capturing the spirit of a distinctly American art form, the character of a regional locale, and the soul of a determined people. It was awarded a Gold Telly Award in the Use of Music for Television and a Bronze Telly Award for the Cultural in Television. Executive producer Marty Ashby and musicians Dwayne Dolphin and Roger Humphries will answer questions after the screening.

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12:30 PM – 1:30 PM
Preserving the Films and Videos of Susan Kleckner

• Jeremy Smith, University of Massachusetts Amherst
• William Kaizen, UMass Amherst

This session will screen several rarely seen film and video works by pioneering feminist/activist filmmaker, Susan Kleckner, whose archive is held by the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center (SCUA) at UMass Amherst. SCUA digitized dozens of Kleckner’s works in preparation for a career spanning exhibit held at Haverford College in the fall of 2025. Kleckner’s work represents over 40 years of creative experimentation and political engagement. This session will offer a long-overdue exploration of Kleckner’s multifaceted film/video career and illuminate her enduring influence on feminist, queer, and activist art practices in the U.S. and beyond. Works to be screened include: Three Lives, Another Look at the 1972 Democratic Convention, Bag Lady, Greenham Common, Windowpeace, and others.

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2:00 PM – 2:15 PM
Camping Out in Yiddishland: Cataloging the Films of Camp Boiberik

• Aaron Lu, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

This talk will be on the reunion films of Camp Boiberik, a Yiddish language summer camp that ran from 1923-1979 in Rhinebeck, New York. The collection located at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research contains over 45 years of amateur films taken at camp, and the challenging of inspecting and and cataloging the films, as well as the essential task of scouring of paper collections for the sparse information about their exhibition.

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2:00 PM – 2:30 PM
WeLuvVideo: How a Volunteer-Run Video Store Became a Living Archive

• Ari Negovschi Regalado, Texas Archive of the Moving Image
• Amber Adamns, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee

What happens to a collection of out-of-distribution, rare, cult, and independent films when Austin’s oldest and largest video rental store, I Luv Video, suddenly closes during the COVID-19 pandemic? This presentation explores how Texas Archive of the Moving Image is collaborating with WeLuvVideo, a volunteer-run video rental store dedicated to reviving the legacy of I Luv Video, to create a community archiving project that preserves rare media found in the original store’s collection.  Presenters will discuss the project’s evolution from a simple idea into a fully operational digitization program, complete with cataloging workflows, student training, and digital preservation infrastructure. The session will also examine the growing challenges facing videotape preservation, particularly for rare cult, independent, and bootleg films distributed through small-scale VHS and home-video networks. Attendees will gain insight into a collaborative, grassroots model that combines outreach, community archiving, and career pathways training to safeguard vulnerable media collections.

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2:00 PM – 3:00 PM
NBC at 100: Preserving Television History

• Jen Hashida, NBCUniversal
• Cassandra Moore, NBCUniversal
• Chase Schulte, NBCUniversal
• Felicity Flesher, NBCUniversal

As NBC celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2026, NBCUniversal is expanding its acclaimed feature preservation efforts into scripted television. This session explores a major initiative to assess and prioritize preservation needs in series from 1949 to 2005—many of which have not been seen since their original broadcast.  Speakers will outline three key strategies: 4K scanning of film-based series, migration of tape-based content to digital formats, and selective restoration of culturally significant titles in 4K Dolby Vision. Together, these approaches address format obsolescence, protect vulnerable assets, and expand opportunities for renewed access across modern distribution platforms.  Through real-world examples, the session will also provide a practical framework for evaluating preservation priorities, highlighting considerations such as historical significance, asset condition, and future use potential.

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2:00 PM – 3:00 PM
Reel to Real: Immersive Archive Experiences in Modern Studio Ecosystem

• Aaron Rogers, NBCUniversal
• Natalie Auxier, NBCUniversal
• Eric Chin, NBCUniversal
• Reilly Saint Amand, NBCUniversal

This panel explores how NBCUniversal is redefining the archive as a dynamic, audience-facing platform that extends beyond preservation into marketing, engagement, and cultural activation. Through pop-ups, premieres, influencer collaborations, and global campaigns, the Archives & Collections team transforms physical assets into powerful experiences that drive brand visibility and deepen audience connection. Featuring case studies from Wicked activations to Shrek anniversary events, this session demonstrates how immersive, real-world encounters with iconic artifacts reintroduce content, amplify cultural moments, and reinforce the enduring relevance of film and television.

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2:15 PM – 2:30 PM
Writing a Media Retention Policy at OPB

• Mia Ferm, Oregon Public Broadcasting

It’s been a journey drafting a Media Retention Policy at Oregon Public Broadcasting, where we are adding new video and audio content to our Archive everyday with current in-house productions. How did we get there, what were the challenges, and most pressing, how will we actually implement the policy? This presentation will share the current policy, the specific context or our production and Archive, challenges to drafting the policy, and continued challenges in implementing it on such a large scale.

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2:30 PM – 2:45 PM
Film Archive CMS: A Django Implementation of the FIAF Manual

• Henry Rosen, UCLA Library

The product landscape for collection management systems specifically geared toward film archives–whether commercial or open-source–is limited. This talk presents a web application built with Django that implements the specifications and functional requirements described in the FIAF Cataloguing Manual. The presentation will be a simple and practical demonstration of the application, aimed at gauging interest in the product, eliciting feedback from active archivists in the field, and finding collaborators.

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2:30 PM – 3:00 PM
Appraising the Student Film Archive from a Local, Provincial and National Perspective: A Case Studty from one University-based Repository

• Nicholas Avedisian-Cohen, Concordia University
• Pamela Caussy, Concordia University

This case study presents research into a small collection of prize-winning student films, a document of the first-generation of Canadian film students.  While this collection comprises less than 1% of the celluloid at our repository, a reappraisal of the student film archive has recently taken place.   This reappraisal reflects renewed scholarly interest in the student film as a genre and its capacity to document place and institution, at the local, regional and national scale.   Beyond the unique research value of these films, this collection links the university to global film and television industries and highlights new imperatives for university-based moving images archives operating in conditions of increasing academic austerity.

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2:45 PM – 3:00 PM
Developing New Video Archiving Guidance for Human Rights Defenders

• Yvonne Ng, WITNESS

This presentation reports on WITNESS’s Mellon-funded project to develop comprehensive new video archiving guidance for human rights defenders. Building on the award-winning Activists’ Guide to Archiving Video first published in 2013, this new guide reflects new approaches to video archiving in lower resourced and high security contexts, and responds to the new threats posed by generative AI and AI manipulation. In this report, we will share the new guide and reflect on changes in the landscape that prompted the update.

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3:15 PM – 3:30 PM
A Different Kind of Paper Record: Digitizing Film Timing Strips

• Joshua Yocum, George Eastman Museum

This presentation will focus on the punched paper tape used for encoding film printer timing information. It will give a brief technical overview of how timing information is encoded onto paper tape and describe variations in the perceived value of these paper records of how a film was printed. It will further explore how open source hardware designed for reading traditional paper tape can be adapted for the purpose of reading the non-standard film printer paper tapes and how this data may still be valuable to modern archivists.

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3:15 PM – 4:15 PM
Can Virtual Reality find a Home in Film Archives? Should it?

• Russell Zych, LA County Museum of Art
• Dino Everett, USC HMH Foundation Moving Image Archive
• Zeynep Abes, USC / The Immersive Archive
• Wilde Davis, UCLA Film & Television Archive

Immersive media or XR (a catch all for Virtual reality, Augmented reality, etc.) is past its emerging novelty phase and is now lauded as a serious art form at countless film festivals and museums. The growing number of XR films/projects that are at risk or actively facing obsolescence raises an urgent question for moving image archives: can we preserve them or is their best hope to find a home elsewhere?  This panel of Archivists and researchers from USC’s HMH Foundation Moving Image Archive, the UCLA Film & Television Archive, LACMA, and the Immersive Archive will share case studies illustrating the challenges of preserving hardware-dependent experiences and art works that don’t fit traditional 2D screens. By discussing what preserving immersive works currently looks like at our institutions, we hope to create an honest conversation about scope, capacity, theory and where to draw the line (or whether we even need one).

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3:15 PM – 4:15 PM
Preserving Pittsburgh’s Queer Media History

• Adam Charles Hart, Media Burn Archive
• Harrison Apple, Carnegie Mellon University
• Steven Haines, Pittsburgh Sound and Image
• Hugo Ljungbäck, University of Chicago

This panel focuses on the efforts of independent archives to locate, preserve, and share the under-recognized history of Pittsburgh’s LGBTQ+ media artists and activists. This panel will discuss the challenges of building an archive out of such under-documented sources, while celebrating the revelatory discoveries uncovered in those collections. Harrison Apple of the Pittsburgh Queer History Project will discuss their groundbreaking work documenting the history of the city’s queer communities, with a focus on community-centered events and documents. Steven Haines will discuss Pittsburgh Sound and Image’s efforts to locate and restore Pittsburgh’s history of avant-garde, independent, and amateur filmmaking by LGBTQ+ artists. Hugo Ljungbäck will discuss their collaboration with Media Burn to archive the collection of video artist and documentary producer Zed Armstrong, focusing on their work with the “Gay Cable Network” and “Videowomen” series. Moderated by Adam Charles Hart of Media Burn Archive.

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3:15 PM – 4:15 PM
The South’s Got Something to Save: Discussing Southern News Collections

• Janine Winfree, Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound
• Frances Cava-Humphrey, Texas Archive of the Moving Image (TAMI)
• Jim Duran, Vanderbilt Television News Archive
• Caetlyn Elder, Arkansas State University

Among moving image collections, news archives provide unique insight into the events, people, and culture of the past by preserving broadcast and production footage. The care and management of these collections require specialized knowledge and understanding of preservation, copyright, licensing, and access issues. Outdated language, evolving social norms, and the complex historical context of regions such as the American South can sometimes complicate the preservation and accessibility of these materials. In this facilitated discussion, three archivists from Tennessee, Texas, and Arkansas will discuss a variety of issues involved in the preservation and accessibility of their news collections, including emerging technologies and ethical considerations. Attendees will learn more about how these Southern institutions work to preserve, share, and provide access to unique news collections.

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3:30 PM – 3:45 PM
It’s Your Film, Not You. Vinegar Syndrome Part Deux

• Susan Etheridge, Packard Humanities Institute

Oooh, that smell. Can you smell that smell? Yes, you can — and it’s your film deteriorating. Vinegar syndrome remains one of the most pressing and persistent threats facing moving image archives worldwide. For decades archives have had to navigate a fragmented landscape of commercial products, institutional practices, and folk remedies of varying efficacy. The AMIA Preservation Committee’s Vinegar Syndrome Project aims to remedy that. This presentation marks the completion and impending publication of the project’s comprehensive online guide to acetate deterioration. The guide surveys a range of tools and treatments available to archivists — from acid-detection strips, to desiccants, and cutting-edge Metal-Organic Framework adsorbents. It documents in-house treatments developed by archives worldwide, rejuvenation techniques for severely deteriorated elements, and methods for acetate identification and microclimate monitoring. Your film may be deteriorating — but after this presentation, people may no longer say, “Can you smell that smell?”

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3:45 PM – 4:00 PM
Pardon Our Dust: Nitrate Decomposition Inspection at the Library of Congress

• Courtney Holschuh, The Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center

One year. Six people. 145,000 reels of nitrate film. The goal: open every can and look for nitrate decomposition. The Library of Congress National Audio-Preservation Center recently completed a year-long inspection of its nitrate film collection with the goal of recording and tracking the level of nitrate deterioration of every reel of film, assessing the preservation needs of the collection, and scanning at-risk nitrate reels. This project report will include the planning and coordination involved in a large-scale inspection, the challenges faced, share the results of the inspection, and discuss next steps.

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4:00 PM – 4:15 PM
Digitizing Douglass Crockwell’s Mutoscopes: The Challenges of Hybrid Moving Image Pre-Cinema Devices

• Jacqueline (Jackie) Grimson, L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation

Douglass Crockwell (1904-1968) was a commercial illustrator and experimental animator with a passion for Mutoscopes, pre-cinema 19th-century flipbook devices which provided an alternative method of exhibiting his animation. The George Eastman Museum holds several of Crockwell’s original Mutoscope works. There has been considerable interest from researchers to watch Mutoscope reels. However, they risk deterioration with play, nor have they been scanned due to the book-bound nature of the cards.   As part of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation, I redesigned the capture stand to improve capture continuity/stability, converted images to non-proprietary preservation-level files, applied digital restoration tools, stabilized cards, and color graded.   This presentation is aimed at those interested in the unique challenges of digitizing and preserving hybrid moving image and paper media or may have Mutoscopes in their collections. This is a beginner-level presentation but some previous knowledge of preservation and restoration would be appreciated.

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4:30 PM – 5:00 PM
That’s a Wrap! Digitizing the WKAR Early Television Films Collection

• Alyssa Davis, Michigan State University
• Leila Sherbini, Michigan State University

Michigan State University Media Preservation Resident Librarians Leila Sherbini and Alyssa Davis present their work preserving the WKAR Early Television Films collection as part of a two year congressionally-funded grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. As the largest in-house digitization project undertaken by MSU’s Media Preservation Unit, Sherbini and Davis were tasked with building out the project’s workflows and database, creating descriptive metadata for each film, and promoting the collection via public channels (blog posts, presentations, local news segments). With the project coming to an end, they are excited to reflect on key successes and challenges they encountered during implementation as well as showcase some highlights from the now-digitized collection.

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4:30 PM – 5:00 PM
The Promise of the Lab: University Audiovisual Archives in Latin America and the Future of Preservation

• Juana Suárez, NYU MIAP

An analysis of the distinctive characteristics of audiovisual university-based laboratories in Latin America in comparison with traditional GLAM institutions and national audiovisual archives. University audiovisual labs represent a new preservation paradigm, one that leverages the university’s infrastructures of research, teaching, public engagement, and innovation to accelerate collection processing, train new preservation practitioners, and broaden forms of stewardship and participation around audiovisual heritage. Ultimately, the paper assesses the significance of this emerging model and its potential to transform the preservation landscape in Latin America.

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4:30 PM – 5:30 PM
The HBCU Radio Preservation Project: Evolving Processes on the Ground

• Becca Bender, Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC)
• Jenohn Euland, NEDCC
• Chinyere Neal, NEDCC
• Bryce Roe, NEDCC

Who gets to do preservation work— and how? This panel examines how an external project-based team collaborates with personnel at Historically Black Colleges and Universities in a manner that is ethically responsive and genuinely collaborative. Four practitioners from the HBCU Radio Preservation Project, a collaboration between the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) and WYSO public radio, will share what on-the ground, community-centered preservation actually requires: flexibility, humility, and a willingness to abandon the plan when it no longer fits.   At a moment when Black history and culture face deliberate threats of erasure, the audio archives of HBCU radio stations hold invaluable records of Black community history, expression, and advocacy.  This session offers attendees a candid look at the process behind this work— and a transferable framework for building archival partnerships that prioritizes people as much as the materials, and embraces evolution as a part of the process.

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5:00 PM – 5:30 PM
SODOM = DEATH: Community’s Collapse + Luther Price’s Super8 Filmmaking

• Bradford Nordeen, University of California Santa Cruz

When artist Luther Price made the super 8mm short SODOM (1989), it was championed as an instant classic by avant garde film scenes in Boston, New York and San Francisco. The same film was rejected from LGBTQAI+ festivals of the era, like MIX NYC, because it ruminated on depictions of gay sex in a time of health crisis. This paper explores the ways in which the term “community” became a ideological tool for archive exclusion. Working from Michael Warner’s writing on publics, which circulate around texts, I explore how organizers discursive rejection towards this text to maintain their energies of HIV/AIDS activism, at the cost of messier affect. And perhaps the grieving process itself. Assembling field correspondence with Price, Peggy Ahwesh, Mark McElhatten and Lia Gangigtano, I will place the film’s historiography within conceptual approaches that surround stigma, found footage and Douglas Crimp’s important work on mourning.

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5:00 PM – 5:30 PM
Tracing Diaspora in San Antonio’s KSAT-Television News Collection

• Ari Negovschi Regalado, Texas Archive of the Moving Image
• Reilly Shaffer, Holland Photo Imaging

In 2025, Texas Archive of the Moving Image (TAMI) hosted an Archivist-in-Residence through the Society of Southwest Archivists fellowship program. The project, Uncovering South Texas History in the KSAT News Collection, originally focused on identifying film and video materials highlighting stories from Latine communities in San Antonio during the 1970s and 1980s. Through a process of discovery, a far more complex history of immigration, global diaspora, and refugee resettlement was uncovered. The collection reveals a broader story of immigration policy and lived experience through raw news footage: Filipino community gatherings during the fall of dictator Ferdinand Marcos, the joy of Chinese Lunar New Year celebrations, and mutual aid efforts such as free community kitchens supporting Latine communities facing food insecurity. At a time when narratives surrounding immigration policy dominate national news cycles, what can we learn from San Antonio, the sixth-largest city in the United States, and an immigration hub whose history offers a longer view of the issues at the center of today’s public discourse?

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7:00 PM
Screening: Becoming Benjamin Lay

The documentary Becoming Benjamin Lay by director Tony Buba and historian Marcus Rediker explores the life and ideas of an unknown radical Quaker dwarf abolitionist who demanded an end to slavery almost 300 years ago. At the center of the film is the prize-winning play Rediker wrote with Naomi Wallace, The Return of Benjamin Lay. Actor Mark Povinelli embodies the visionary Lay, challenging us to live with courage and conviction in dark times. The film brings a forgotten hero back to modern public memory.

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10:00 AM – 5:00 PM – Separate registration required
Community Archiving Workshop

• Grace Lile, Independent
• Emily Pojman, University of North Texas Libraries Special Collections
• Crystal Rangel, New York Public Library
• Leila Sherbini, Michigan State University
• Daniel Lin, Baltimore County Public Libraries

A Community Archiving Workshop (CAW) has been held in conjunction with the annual AMIA conference every year since 2011. Participation in the CAW provides moving image archivists the opportunity to serve the local community and work with local volunteers to help an organization gain intellectual and physical control over an unprocessed audiovisual collection.

Attendees will engage in hands-on processing, inspection, and cataloging of audiovisual media, and gain experience in working with and training non-archivists in these basics of collections care. Just as importantly, they will build relationships and connections with local members of the Pittsburgh community, and learn about local history.