Poster Sessions
Poster: Expanding Access to Brazilian Home Movies – A Cinelimite Case Study
- William Marc Plotnick, Cinelimite Inc. / NYU MIAP
Cinelimite Inc. is a new American non-profit company dedicated to expanding access to Brazilian cinema and audiovisual history in the United States. One of their missions is to highlight how amateur film and filmmakers have recorded moments of Brazil throughout the 20th century that reflect the diverse culture of that country, equal to any feature length or professionally produced work. Upon creating an open call for people in Brazil to send Cinelimite their home movies here in the United States, and some significant outreach efforts, the company was sent over eighty super-8mm home films. After significant efforts to repair and scan these works under a low budget, a majority of them can now be freely seen on their website. With this poster session, Cinelimite co-founders William Plotnick and Gustavo Menezes will talk about the importance of amateur film preservation and access in Latin American countries such as Brazil.
Poster: You’ll never QC alone: applications of automated quality control aids
- Andrew Weaver, University of Washington Libraries
- Susie Cummings, National Public Radio
While cultural heritage institutions rush to reformat rapidly degrading audiovisual collections, the high volume of throughput results in a whole slew of challenges – one being quality control of digitized assets. With digital proxies becoming the primary means of future access to these collections, organizations are caught between two competing realities: the importance of ensuring 100% accuracy of transfers and the lack of dedicated staffing for quality control. To help address this problem, Andrew Weaver (University of Washington Libraries) and Susie Cummings (NPR) have developed and implemented automated tools built around open-source software to help practitioners rapidly scan digitized assets and identify files for more focused quality control analysis. This poster will present their work on ‘audioqc’ a tool for quickly applying metrics to audio streams (from both audiovisual and pure audio sources) as well as experimentation in applying the methodology of audioqc to other sources such as DPX film scans.
Poster: As the Reel Turns: An Undergraduate Experience Working with Film
- Katie Higley, Central Michigan University
My poster presentation highlights my undergraduate student experience processing and describing an archival film collection, and my summer 2020 digital internship in which I encoded a EAD finding aid on the same small film project. I completed this task without the University having a Library School program, an Audiovisual Archivist, or an ongoing budget for the project. This experience has allowed me to find common ground while studying Public History, Museum Studies, Cinema Studies, and Anthropology. I have learned skills and the practical application of best standards and archival theory. After my experience with the film collection, I want to pursue a career in Audiovisual Archiving.
Poster: Mexicanos in Oregon: Improving Access to their stories through metadata
- Valeria Dßvila, Oregon State University Libraries
In spring term 2020, the Oregon Multicultural Archives at the Oregon State University Libraries and Press collaborated with the OSU course Ethnic Studies 416/516 Migrant Health on an oral history assignment involving the Erlinda Gonzales-Berry Papers Collection, 1943-2010. The students listened to the oral history interviews and wrote interviewee bios, summaries, and historical context essays in Spanish and English, as the majority of the interviews are in Spanish. Parting from the bilingual metadata created by the students, my work as a Library Diversity Scholar consisted of reviewing, correcting, and in some cases translating and creating metadata with the aim to enhancing the online finding aid and help make these oral histories more discoverable and accessible for research. By focusing on the metadata creation and revision workflow for this project, this poster offers an easy-to-implement model for improving oral history discoverability and access especially useful to academic libraries and archives.
Poster: Introducing a Project to Recover and Exhibit Peruvian Amateur Films
- Lorena Escala Vignolo, EQZE Alumni
The poster presentation will focus on a project derived from the master’s degree thesis I started at Elφas Querejeta Zine Eskola (San Sebastian) centered on the reflection on home movies and amateur films from my country, Per·. The encounter with some Super-8 mm films from an amateur filmmaker from the Amazon and the task of digitizing them, along with another 42 orphan film reels bought in Lima by the director of MUTA International Found-Footage Film Festival, and the proliferation of online exhibitions due to the pandemic, got me the idea of creating a portal for sharing some of these moving images. As there is no public entity, at a national or local range, that digitizes and promotes the caring for home movies, private initiatives are crucial. With the support of my school’s teachers and my mentor from the AMIA DIFP, www.cineamateurperuano.org was born. It suddenly came to my mind to turn it into a way to link existing related projects on the field. So far, it is just a platform to share home movies, plan Home Movie Days and search for new material. Some people interested or who is already working on digitization has contacted me though the site. On one hand, the poster will point out to the problems I have found so far, but also the possibilities to make this idea grow to formalize a digital archive with a proper catalogue and easy access for the general public. I think the issues of the proliferation of people getting digital copies of their home movies by themselves and throwing the originals, the acquisition of orphan films by privates who are not thinking of these artifacts as heritage, the lack of proper equipment and the disaggregation of projects about small gauge films are common, specially, in Latin America. This will be a good opportunity to discuss on those things and, at the same time, to put peruvian amateur and home movies production on a wider scope, which is something almost unknown.
Poster: The Long Journey of Eugenio Cardini and His Films
- Lorena Bordigoni, Independent Researcher
This presentation is about the discovery of two Argentinian films considered long lost. In 1902 Eugenio Cardini bought a Cinematographe Lumiere in France, with which he shot some of the first films ever made in South America. None of these films were preserved in their original format, and one of them was considered, until now, completely lost. In 2020 two of these films, in the original Lumiere format, were discovered in Lodz, Poland. After some research we managed to reconstruct these reels’ odyssey: from Buenos Aires to London, then to Paris, to Germany and finally to Poland. A digitization and restoration project will make these films available for the public.
Poster: Streaming State: Experiments in Archives, Remote Learning, and Student Curation
- Courtney Fellion, San Francisco State University
ôThe Archive Projectö is a new initiative launched by the SFSU School of Cinema in 2020 as a volunteer-led program to promote student engagement with the School of CinemaÆs instructional film collection and the student film archives dating back to the 1970s. Due to ongoing budget cuts, the school has not prioritized cataloging or organizing the majority of these materials. As a short term solution, the undergraduate film exhibitions course CINE 601 was redesigned to explore the archive through student-curated film programs. Utilizing the rough, digital copies of the student film collection, the class researched and developed six curated film programs to share on the class website ôStreaming State,ö and secured screening permissions from alumni filmmakers. This poster examines these student-led curation projects and also details some of the opportunities of online learning through archives, such as community building through the alumni networks and broadening the audience through online screenings.