Meet the Navigators!

Conferences can be an intimidating place, whether you’re planning on attending your first or your 25th conference. If you’re new, there’s probably a lot going on that may not be clear or may be unfamiliar. We want the conference to be more welcoming to everyone, and particularly to those who may be attending or presenting for the first time. With that in mind, this year we’ve added an online Conference 101 guide, a webinar on “how to conference” for those who may have never attended a conference before, a reimagined Newcomer’s Orientation on Wednesday, and a team of Conference Navigators.

The Navigators are all long-time conference attendees and active participants in AMIA. They are not only the official conference welcomers, but will be available all week to answer questions or lend a helping hand to anyone who might need a little help in navigating the conference. They’ll all be easily identifiable – and we’ve included their pictures here so you can get to know them. Please say hello, ask questions about the conference, about AMIA, or what they do when they aren’t Navigating!

Ruta Abolins

Ruta  is the Head of the Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection which holds over 300,000 audiovisual items.. The archives is home to  six local news collections in 16mm and tape formats representing Atlanta, Augusta, Savannah, Albany, and Columbus, Georgia. Ruta has an MA in Library and Information Studies from the University of Wisconsin and an MA in Popular Culture from Bowling Green State University.

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Snowden Becker

Snowden Becker is the MLIS Program Director at UCLA’s Department of Information Studies. She has been an AMIA member and conference attendee since 2001, participating in multiple committees and interest groups (Conference Program, Education, Publications, Small Gauge & Amateur Film, Scholarships) and serving as Secretary of the Board from 2013-2014. Her research interests focus on how audiovisual materials–especially nontheatrical media like home movies and bodycam footage–are integrated into our larger cultural heritage.

ASK HER ABOUT: How to make the most of the AMIA conference,
education and career options in media preservation, Home Movie Day, cats, knitting, food, and thrift-store shopping.

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Rachel Del Gaudio

While attending Chapman University for a degree in Film Studies, Rachel spent her each summer interning at film archives. Those lost summers paid off when she was offered a position at the Academy Film Archive in 2007 to work with their nitrate film collection, and then subsequently landed a job at the Library of Congress in their Motion Picture division in 2009. During her time at the Library, she has worked in the vaults, processed collections, inspected prints for film loans and has worked to barcode the vast collection. The most rewarding project has been co-creating and orchestrating “Mostly Lost,” the annual workshop that is dedicated to identifying unknown films from around the world. The workshop is an organic extension of the Flickr page that she created in 2008 as chair of the Association of Moving Image Archivists’ Nitrate Committee that serves the same purpose. Rachel has been chair of the Nitrate Committee since 2008 and a member of AMIA since 2002.

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Rebecca Fraimow 

Rebecca Fraimow is the Digital Ingest Manager at the WGBH Media Library and Archives and the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, where she oversees digital archiving workflows, the Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship program, and the development of the PBCore metadata standard. Rebecca was a founding member of New York City’s XFR Collective, a nonprofit organization supporting the preservation of at-risk audiovisual media, and previously managed the Dance Heritage Coalition’s NYC Digitization Hub.

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J. Chris Horak

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Reto Kromer

Having graduated in mathematics and computer science, Reto Kromer became involved in audio-visual conservation and restoration more than thirty years ago. He was head of preservation at the Cinémathèque suisse (Swiss National Film Archive), and lecturer at the University of Lausanne and the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. He has been running his own preservation company, AV Preservation by reto.ch, and lecturing at the Bern University of Applied Sciences. His current research includes colour spaces, look-up tables and codec programming and emulation. He was a director of the board for the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) during two terms.

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Taylor McBride

Taylor McBride is a Multimedia Specialist for the Smithsonian Institution’s Digital Asset Management System, where she supports DAMS users and workflows with a focus on video and digital preservation as well as SI’s Collections DAMS Integration System, which bridges the DAMS with Collections Information Systems across the Institution. She has been an active member of AMIA since 2010, and has served as Co-Chair of the Small Gauge and Amateur Film Committee since 2012. As co-chair, she has helped the committee to establish regular small gauge educational workshops at the annual conference. Taylor currently serves on the board of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Moving Image Archive (MarMIA). She is a graduate of NYU’s MIAP program.

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Jen O’Leary

Jen O’Leary is the Archive Library Analyst in Archive Operations at NBCUniversal. She graduated from the UCLA MIAS program in 2016 where she was the President of the UCLA AMIA Student Chapter and held internships at the USC Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive, the Wende Museum of the Cold War, and the Academy Film Archive. Jen was also the 2015 recipient of the AMIA Image Permanence Institute Internship. Jen has been a member of AMIA since 2014, and has attended each AMIA Conference since then, as well as numerous Reel Thing and DAS conferences. She has presented posters and been on panels, and has co-planned Student Mixers, meetings, and the Resume Table. She was the AMIA Education Committee Student Liaison from 2015-2017, and has been Co-Chair of the Education Committee since 2017. Jen is also a member of the Advocacy Committee of the Board.

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Lorena Ramírez-López

Lorena Ramírez-López is a trained audiovisual archivist from New York University’s Moving Image and Archiving Program. Her concentration was on video and digital preservation where she applied her skills in various environments such as museums, libraries, non-profits, and multiple Audiovisual Preservation Exchanges in Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, and Brasil.

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Dave Rice

Dave Rice is an audiovisual archivist and technologist and a graduate of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation. Dave’s work focuses on the application of open source technology for audiovisual preservation as well as facilitating coordination and collaboration between communities that preserve media, develop software, and author standards. He has worked as an archivist or archival consultant at media organizations like CUNY, Democracy Now!, The United Nations, WITNESS, DCTV, and Bay Area Video Coalition. Dave also works on developing standards for file formats used in audiovisual preservation, such as Matroska and FFV1, via participation in the Internet Engineering Task Force’s working group on lossless audiovisual formats (cellar). Dave was the 2016 recipient of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance’s Innovation Award and also the 2016 recipient of the Association of Moving Image Archivists’ Alan Stark Award.

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Chase Schulte

Chase Schulte entered the realm of the moving image archivist almost 20 years ago after many years inside the Post Production and International Distribution world of the Studios. “Finding the AMIA community when I did was a real eye opener for me. It was right at the time that many archives were moving from a very isolated place to be to suddenly being the prime focus of almost every department of a Studio. My AMIA membership opened a door and the conferences have opened that door to the world.” The recurring theme is each of his projects remains high profile and high volume inventory acquisitions and migrations as well as full collection inspections. In his current role as Studio Archivist at NBCUniversal, Chase continues the work of shepherding the DreamWorks Animation family of assets into the NBCU library collection.

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Wendy Shay

Wendy Shay, one of AMIA’s founders, spent 35 years as an audiovisual archivist at the Smithsonian Institution’s Human Studies Film Archives and the National Museum of American History Archives Center. She retired in 2017, but continues to be active in the field as an independent researcher, a member of the AMIA election’s committee, and a volunteer at the Human Studies Film Archives and the National Archives’ Film Lab.  Wendy is a former president and ardent supporter of AMIA.

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Lee Shoulders

Lee Shoulders is Director of Video Content Development at Getty Images and is responsible for the development and curation of video content at Getty Images. Working closely with a global network of Content Partners such as Sony Pictures, Warner Brothers, Bloomberg, and Smithsonian Institution, Lee drives the direction of new content from partners whether it is news, archive, or creative commercial footage. This direction ensures a constant flow of impactful, engaging and relevant video is provided to Getty Images for licensing to customers globally. Lee started her career at Archive Films in 1992, functioning in the previous roles of sales and research associate, library manager and acquisitions manager. Archive Films was subsequently purchased by Getty Images in 1999. Lee has been very active in the stock footage community for over 20 years and is a founding Board member of ACSIL, the Association of Commercial Image Licensors and has served several terns on the Board of the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA), a non-profit organization focused on the preservation and advancement of moving images.  Lee has a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Texas at Austin.

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Colleen Simpson

Colleen Simpson is VP of Operations for Prasad Corporation.  A long-time AMIA member, she has served on the Board, volunteered on committees, and is currently Trivia Master for AMIA’s Annual Trivia Night.  When she isn’t managing preservation projects, or writing trivia questions, she spends time coaching soccer, climbing mountains, and planning impossible road rallies.   She is not currently working on a memoir.

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John Tariot

John Tariot of Film Video Digital works both in the past: preserving motion picture film for a national clientele of archives and film and TV production professionals, and in the future: developing digital strategies for motion picture archives. A futurist with a track-record, John led the advent of the online stock footage economy with the creation of FOOTAGE.net, which included designing and building groundbreaking online databases for NBC News, National Geographic, Paramount Pictures, CNN, and many others. Now, current work is focused on AI’S coming impact on motion picture archiving, some of which will be shared in this session. John’s career also includes serving on the Advisory Committee for Peter Gabriel’s human rights archive WITNESS- and on the Advisory Board for the broadcast-industry bible POST Magazine. He is a member of the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA), the American Film Institute (AFI), and his expertise in color correction and image restoration has been recognized by acceptance to Colorist Society International (CSI), where he is Judging Officer for the 2019 CSI Colorist Awards to be presented at the National Association of Broadcasters in April, 2019.

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Erwin Verbruggen

Erwin Verbruggen is a user studies and digital preservation specialist who works on several (inter)national projects in the field of preservation and open data. Erwin obtained an MA in Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image at the University of Amsterdam. He interned at the human rights organization WITNESS in Brooklyn, NY and was a film programmer for the Amsterdam-based Open Air Film Festival Pluk de Nacht. He helped set up the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision’s film scanning process, and was a scanning operator during the Images for the Future project. At the Research & Development department, he has been a project lead on European collaborative projects, where he co-designed the interactive Na de Bevrijding XL application and became network liaison for the EUscreen Foundation. He is the publishing support for the open access VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture. Erwin coordinates the annual Winter School for Audiovisual Archiving, is involved in audiovisual archiving toolset development through the PREFORMA and AVEROS projects, and develops web archiving best practices for the award-winning Digital City Revives. Erwin is a member of AMIA’s Open Source Committee, co-chair of the International Outreach Committee, and the Continuing Education Task Force. Erwin has been a guest lecturer at Utrecht University, the University of Amsterdam, the ENCRyM School for Conservation and National University in Mexico City and at the Winter School training sessions.

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