Poster Sessions
There will be two Poster Sessions at AMIA 2015 – with a slate of great presentations! Check your program for the individual poster schedule.
Collaborative Method for Overcoming the “Lack Of”: Case Study of Japan
Ann Adachi-Tasch, Collaborative Cataloging Japan
A collaborative method for the cataloging and preservation of postwar Japanese experimental moving image offers great potential for resolving several issues observed in Japan, including the lack of media archival infrastructure; limited funding and technical resources for preservation; and opening public access to important cultural material. Established in 2015, the nonprofit Collaborative Cataloging Japan (CCJ), supports archival and media preservation efforts by institutional and private collections for Japanese avant-garde moving image. http://www.collabjapan.org/
The BPA Film Collection: Out of the Archives and Into the Public Eye
Libby Burke, Bonneville Power Administration Library
In 1994, eight metal storage boxes lined with black foam were filled with fifty 16mm reels containing most of the films that the Bonneville Power Administration had made over the previous 55 years were shipped to NARA in Seattle, where they were put in a cold storage room on the records side of the building, and promptly forgotten. Meanwhile, an intrepid film archivist had started work in the BPA Library as a researcher in 2012. She held a film festival to introduce BPA workers to their filmed history, including one which had songs by Woody Guthrie. Even though they were copies of copies of tape copies, washed out and dropped out, they were so popular that the Library decided to release six films on DVD for public distribution. Just before printing, NARA Seattle called to say they had just “found” these fifty boxes, and did BPA Library want them? Now able to transfer original prints to digital format and release the films in a package that came to be distributed throughout the Pacific Northwest, the U.S. and even Europe and India as well as YouTube, the BPA Film Collection was launched. The second volume of seven films was released in 2015, and over 5000 copies have now been distributed of the 2 collections free of charge.
AMIA@NYU: New York University’s Student Chapter of the
|Association of Moving Image Archivists
Luke Moses, New York University, Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program
This poster highlights the 2015-2016 events and accomplishments of the NYU Student Chapter of AMIA. The current executive committee has embraced “collaboration” as a raison d’être, with a Home Movie Day event at Rutgers University, a live-scored screening event at the New York Public Library for UNESCO World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, an Audiovisual Preservation Exchange (APEX) volunteer trip to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and a partnership with the Society of American Archivists (SAA) chapter at Pratt Institute.
Implementing a Video Digitization Program:
Western Front’s Early Literary Digitization Project
Kristy Waller, The Western Front Society
Shyla Seller, The Westhern Front Society
The Western Front Media Archive consists primarily of single-channel videos dating back to the early 1970s, primarily 1/2″ open reel and U-Matics. In the summer of 2015, we purchased the technology necessary to begin digitizing our oldest and most at-risk tapes. This poster will review the set-up of our digitization station, problems we encountered during testing, and how we overcame them.
Jan Baross: Films of Enduring Vision
Peter Schreiner, Lewis & Clark College Special Collections and Archives
Jan Baross is an independent West Coast filmmaker who began experimenting in the late 1960s, mixing live action with animation and film-surface alteration. Her 16mm and video collection spans 45 years and is a notable addition to the Oregon Historical Society’s Moving Image Collection. The works include PSAs, industrials, documentaries, biographies, live-action and animated shorts. Baross’s enduring vision comes through in her patient and sympathetic style, which imbues each film with a personal feeling.
Expanding Access Through Music: The Adrian Cowell Films and Research Collection
Andrew Weaver and Libby S. Hopfauf
Media Archives Tech, University of Washington Libraries
Often undervalued within mixed-media archival collections, audio materials can provide overarching contextual guidance for a collection, broadening its scholarly utility. Among the largest extant relating to the inner workings of Golden Triangle drug trafficking, this collection contains the raw footage of documentary filmmaker, Adrian Cowell including his time in 1960s/70s Tibet and the insurgent Shan State of Burma. While recording audio for potential use, Cowell created a unique and extensive musical assemblage from regions restricted to outsiders.
Assessing Archival Workflows and Micro-services at CUNY Television
Dinah Handel, National Digital Stewardship Resident at CUNY Television
Presently, the archival workflows at CUNY Television utilize a suite of “micro-services” in order to accomplish specific tasks. This poster will provide an overview of the current CUNY-TV workflow and its present use of micro-services, show results from an assessment of the micro-services and CUNY-TV workflow, and present preliminary suggestions for improvements to the workflow, in line with best practices for preservation standards, CUNY-TV’s needs, and long term digital sustainability.
Roadside Memories: A Digital Tour of Florida Attractions, 1945-1980
David Morton, University of Central Florida
Following the end of World War II, the State of Florida experienced one of the most drastic demographic and developmental transformations in American history. In the thirty-five year between 1945 and 1980 the state’s population quadrupled. During the same period, with the revolution in air travel and advent of theme park attractions, Florida emerged as the top tourist destination in the United States. This period of change also coincides with the popular use of home movies as a means of recording family vacations. These home movies unknowingly captured an important turning point in the history of heritage tourism in the State of Florida. The purpose of Roadside Memories is to incorporate the donations of a number of individual film collections to provide a visual point of reference to better comprehend the impact of this incredible spatial transformation.
Video Data Bank Digitization Project
Kristin MacDonough, Digitization Specialist, Video Data Bank
Video Data Bank (VDB) is a leading resource in the United States for video by and about contemporary artists. The VDB Collection includes work from over 550 artists and 6,000 video art titles, and work is available through an international distribution service. Committed to digitization and preservation of its video archive, VDB expanded its efforts towards full digitization of the archive. Focusing on our internal progress, this poster will describe our ongoing work towards this goal.
The Ethical Ambiguity of Preserving Medical Films
Manda Haligowski, McGill University
Medical films function as educational tools and historical records, as well as a source of morbid fascination for some. However, when patients have not consented to being filmed or to how a film is screened, ethical issues may emerge that archivists must address. This poster encourages discussion on the voyeuristic appeal of medical films and their value to non-medical audiences, the tension between increasing accessibility while upholding ethical standards, and whether these issues can be mitigate
Discovering Small Audiovisual Collections with AV Compass
Lauren O’Connor, Bay Area Video Coalition
Kathy O’Regan Bay Area Video Coalition
AV Compass is a free online resource built to empower individuals and small organizations to take first steps to preserve their audiovisual media collections. Developed by the Bay Area Video Coalition with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, AV Compass features eleven short instructional videos, five PDF guides, and a tool for creating accurate collection inventories.
Wyoming in Film: Increasing Access to Wyoming’s Motion Picture Heritage
Kathy Gerlach, University of Wyoming American Heritage Center
Using a grant from the Wyoming Cultural Trust Fund, the focus of this project was to provide access copies to 707 films on Wyoming. The films ranged from our earliest films from S. N. Leek of Jackson Hole shot in 1908 to travel films of Mildred Capron shot in the 1960s and 1970s. In between there are home movies of ranch life, camping, pack and raft trips, and activities of University of Wyoming students.
SAMMA Solo vs. Blackmagic Design: A Cost-Benefit Analysis
Alex Marsh, Duke University Libraries
Duke University Libraries recently replaced our SAMMA Solo with two Blackmagic Design-equipped iMacs for a fraction of the cost of the SAMMA Solo. This has enabled us to achieve 10-bit video digitization from analog videotapes, and migrate multiple tapes simultaneously, neither of which was possible before, using our SAMMA Solo. Our new system is more versatile, user-friendly and less expensive. My poster will compare the features, costs, and pros & cons of the two systems.
Visualizing Video Data Over Time
Henry Borchers
Performing comprehensive quality assurance on digital video files is a daunting task for any sized collection and is especially true for large quantities of video. With traditional methods of spot checking, much of the video content remains unchecked due to time constrains. I created a data visualization technique which visually maps each frame’s characteristics over the duration of the entire video, allowing one to easily pick out potential points of interest including possible artifacts.
Commercial Content & Alternative America: Exploring the David Stern Archive
Ariel Schudson, Independent Archivist
David Stern was an award-winning cinematographer/director in the film and television industry for over 30 years. Having worked with cult filmmakers like Jack Hill and Bob Cresse, David then began his advertising career with edgy firms exploring hippie corporate landscapes. Creating a variety of multi-format media ranging from 1960s “music videos” to an extensive body of star-studded TV commercials, this presentation centers on the critical nature of preserving the David Stern Archive and its place in television advertising history
The Silent Film Project at the Library of Congress
Amy Jo Stanfill, Library of Congress
The Silent Film Project is a new digitization project at the Library of Congress. This project grew out of the study on the Survival of American Silent Feature Films: 1912 to 1929, conducted by the Library of Congress and funded by the National Film Preservation Board. The goal of the Silent Film Project is to borrow, catalog, digitally preserve, and ensure the availability of silent (and selected sound era) films for public viewing and research.
The Teeterboard Act: The Circus World Museum Film Collection
Molly McBride, University of Wisconsin-Madison
This poster highlights a graduate student practicum project at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research on the Circus World Museum Robert L. Parkinson Library and Research Center’s film collection. The poster features these institutions as an example of a partnership that focused on collections care and access, access to technology and expertise, working around budget and staffing constraints, and working to create new systems that are beneficial to both institutions.
Academic Library VHS Preservation: A Collaborative Section 108 Log
Christopher Lewis, American University Library
Before digitizing copyrighted VHS tapes, a library/archive must address US Copyright, Section 108. The law requires that a reasonable search be conducted to determine that no unused copy of the title is commercially available, and a log of that search should be maintained. The section108video.com database was developed as a repository for sharing of these logs with the intention of speeding the research of other librarians and archivists and encouraging the undertaking of digitization projects.
Preserving KUHT: America’s First Public Television Station
Emily Vinson, University of Houston Special Collections
Broadcasting from the University of Houston, KUHT signed on air for the first time on May 25, 1953, with the promise of providing the growing city with educational programming. Focused on preservation and access, the University of Houston has undertaken a project to digitize an initial selection of 16mm films from the station’s early years, while also endeavoring to gain intellectual control over the large broadcast collection, spanning five decades and a variety of formats.
“Copyright be damned!” User Justifications for Reproducing Copyrighted Materials
Ellen LeClere, School of Library and Information Studies, University of Wisconsin – Madison
How do archives users justify reusing copyrighted materials? There are many users who are unaware or are willing to risk of copyright infringement (or conversely, limit their usage when they could legally create reproductions). Exploring justifications for reproducing and disseminating copyrighted materials exposes gaps in copyright knowledge and highlights the disparity between what is needed and what is permitted, allowing film archivists to promote legislation that allows for broader and unfettered access to collections.
Metadata for the Digitization History of Time-based Media Art
Peggy Griesinger, George Mason University Libraries
This poster will discuss results from a recent project at the Museum of Modern Art aimed at creating a standardized metadata profile to describe the digitization history of time-based media artworks. This poster will provide the audience with the necessary tools to apply this metadata profile, which utilizes the standards METS, PREMIS, and PBCore, to their own collections by providing example records that follow an artwork as it is transferred and digitized into multiple different formats.
Collaborative Method for Overcoming the “Lack Of”: Case Study of Japan
Ann Adachi-Tasch, Collaborative Cataloging Japan
A collaborative method for the cataloging and preservation of postwar Japanese experimental moving image offers great potential for resolving several issues observed in Japan, including the lack of media archival infrastructure; limited funding and technical resources for preservation; and opening public access to important cultural material. Established in 2015, the nonprofit Collaborative Cataloging Japan (CCJ), supports archival and media preservation efforts by institutional and private collections for Japanese avant-garde moving image. http://www.collabjapan.org/
Preserving Malware in Archives, Libraries, and Museums
Jonathan Farbowitz, New York University, MIAP
The preservation of malicious software, known as malware, as a digital object for historical and cultural study is frequently ignored by cultural heritage institutions. I want to develop a more nuanced discussion about storing malware (and the potential consequences of removing malware from media accessioned into collections), appraising its archival value, assessing its risks, and cataloging it. The WANK worm serves as a case study in examining the challenges of preserving malware and its associated context.
Modern Workflows for Deteriorating Physical Assets at NBCUniversal
Jen O’Leary, UCLA Moving Image Archive Studies
This project illustrates the work I did with NBCUniversal’s Archive Operations to put in place a best practices workflow for identification, preservation, testing, documentation, and storage of vinegar syndrome assets in the company’s vaults. By streamlining these processes, all of the departments at NBCUniversal are better able to work together to assure the preservation of many integral titles for years to come.
Searching for Sanctuary: The Anti-War Documentary Footage of Fred Engelberg
Shani Miller, UCLA Moving Image Archive Studies
Sometime in the late 1960s and early 1970s, filmmaker Fred Engelberg began a documentary project chronicling the sanctuary movement that emerged in response to the Vietnam War. This poster presentation explores the anti-war documentary footage contained in the Fred Engelberg Collection at the USC Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive, and details efforts to contextualize these events within Engelberg’s body of work, as well as the larger anti-war movement in Los Angeles.
No Archives? No Problem! How to Create and Maintain a Moving Image Archive
Rachel Behnke, University of Wisconsin – Madison School of Library and Information Studies
This poster depicts one museum’s innovative transformation of an unused equipment room into a climate-controlled space capable of accommodating a film collection. The author shares her firsthand knowledge and experience working closely with museum staff to ensure the lasting organization and preservation of moving image materials in a facility that, at one time, possessed neither the space nor the conditions to do so. If they could do it, so can you!
A (Motion) Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: Supporting Access to Motion Picture Oral Histories
Robin Margolis, MLIS UCLA, Media Archiving
This poster situates the work of the Academy Foundation’s implementation of a Motion Picture Oral History Digital Archive (MPOHDA) within the larger trends of digital oral history collections. It demonstrates the project’s context through emerging best practices surrounding access to oral histories, and presents the findings of a survey geared towards the potential users of MPOHDA. The poster also offers examples of the evolving design of the project.
Providing Access to Audiovisual Collections in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives
Tali Han, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives are undertaking a two-year grant funded project to and digitize film and sound recordings. The recordings document the Museum’s influential and vibrant history of exhibitions, artist interactions, performances, and public programs from the 1960s to present. Archivists will create finding aids for four collections accessible the Guggenheim website, and will provide public access to over 300 hours of digitized assets through several online portals.
Workflows for Born Digital Materials in a Museum Collection
Eddy Colloton, Denver Art Museum (Conservation Intern), NYU MIAP
By identifying stakeholders and establishing buy-in from multiple departments, the Denver Art Museum (DAM) was able to implement a complex digital preservation strategy quickly and efficiently. Artworks from the museum’s design collection were disk imaged, ingested into the museum’s digital repository, and described in the museum’s collection management system. While sophisticated tools like Archivematica, BitCurator, and the Kryoflux were essential to the process, the combined efforts of the museum staff ensured a successful project.