Vote for Pop Up Sessions!
Pop-Up Sessions offer an opportunity to present a topic that has “popped up” after the proposal deadline; it also offers an opportunity for members to choose sessions of interest that might not already be part of the program.
The Program Committee invites your vote on which Pop-Up sessions you would most like to see presented at the conference. Please vote for up to three proposals. All AMIA members eligible to vote. Please vote only once.
Deadline for casting your vote: Saturday, September 21st.
Equity Through Archival Internships and Classes at the Community College Level
Chair: Jackie Jay, Diablo Valley College
Our diverse community is in our community colleges. We have an opportunity to provide introductory audiovisual courses and hands-on experience to students at the community college level, which not only provides them with a leg up if they decide to continue their archival education, but could help us develop the next generation of repair technicians through the community college technical school programs.
As an adjunct professor at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, CA I helped develop a survey course called Digital Assets: Tools and Methodologies. In the course students of diverse ethnic, socio-economic and education levels learn care and handling of archival materials, creation of digital assets from two-dimensional objects, develop identifiers and metadata for their assets, upload them to a cloud-based DAM, QC each other’s work and present their searchable group collections as their final projects. The students also visit the San Francisco Opera Archives and the DigiCenter at the San Francisco Public Library. For almost all of the students this was the first time that they had ever visited an archive or met anyone who scanned physical objects as a part of their job.
Two of those students are interning with me this semester, assessing and potentially digitizing audiovisual materials from the 45-year run of the iconic San Francisco musical theater company, Beach Blanket Babylon. Ideal candidates for this pop-up session would include the two students that are currently interning with me (funding permitting), audiovisual curriculum developers who work with both MLIS programs and community colleges and AMIA members that completed a library technology program through a community college. I or possibly someone from AMIA studying the need for diversity in our profession might be available to chair the session.
Activating Arts Archives: Case Studies in (Re)Presentation
Chair: Monika Kin Gagnon, Concordia University
This session will invite and present various approaches to activating archival moving image and time-based media in arts-based contexts such as museums, cinematheques and artist-run centres. Artworks (including film, video and multimedia), their exhibitions, presentation and related events often present unique challenges for re-presentation and documentation. Yet, web-based platforms and digital publications – both off-the-shelf and custom-designed – are increasingly demonstrating inventive ways for animating these materials and engaging various publics, opening otherwise discreet archives and collections to new viewerships. For example, the New Museum’s Digital Archive is leveraging digitized moving images and interactive web archives through their scholarly publishing platform ATLAS and recent Webrecorder integration; the Cinémathèque québécoise has created a custom platform, “Dossiers sur la collection,” to present various moving image and paper artifacts; and artists themselves have explored lively ways of creatively animating archival materials.
Presenters are invited to introduce case studies that explore various modalities of access, discoverability, and contextualization for time-based and other archival materials, therein highlighting examples of digital media’s potential to multiply imaginative connections between and across artifacts, and sometimes disparate collections of creative works. The intended audience for this session includes archivists, researchers and artists working with art-based or other creative collections, who will be interested in innovative ways of animating and presenting artifacts, as well as the technical affordances of existing and custom-designed platforms. This session will proceed by giving presenters 7-10 minutes to present their case studies, and depending on how many presenters there will be, the remaining time will be for open discussion amongst panelists and the audience. We hope to have up to 5 diverse case examples to highlight and compare the benefits and limitations of different approaches.
Archiving as Resistance
Chair: Natalie Cadranel, OpenArchive
This will be a presentation for moving image archivists interested in an ethical, participatory way to collect, preserve, and amplify audiovisual media created on mobile phones. It is also for organizations and individuals who are interested in starting their own mobile media collection efforts. I will outline key aspects of my current project, OpenArchive, a culmination of ethnographic research and open source mobile development over the past 5 years. In the presentation I will discuss sharing Save, a white-labeled open-source mobile app. created by and for archivists, activists, human rights defenders, journalists, and lawyers, case studies of recent participatory archiving efforts, and emergent groups interested in collecting and reusing mobile digital media.
The application was originally a proof of concept envisioned during my masters thesis work at the UC Berkeley ISchool in 2013 to create a free, open-source mobile archiving application that maintains the privacy, provenance, and preservation of mobile media by uniting the efforts of Tor, Creative Commons, and the Internet Archive. With funding from the Knight Foundation, the application launched in beta for android in 2014. After extensive usability testing and research, I raised more funding and partnered with the Guardian Project and Human Rights Watch to create the newest version called Save (share, archive, verify, encrypt), now available in iTunes and Google Play. I will share findings from this research and my experiences working with those interested in using the mobile application, namely: journalists, archivists, and activists.
During the session, I will break down the three key aspects of the application: privacy, preservation, provenance. Attendees will learn about how this tool might help them create local collections in their communities, how Tor works, creative commons licensing, and strategies for leveraging efforts of like-minded communities to preserve digital mobile media.
Citizens armed with mobile devices are becoming history’s first responders, amassing rich, contextualized, and crucial historical documentation. However, the media they create is incredibly fragile and difficult to verify, often disappearing as a result of privacy concerns, data loss, or a lack of affordable, secure cloud storage; if shared, the most common destination for this media is on social media platforms that can chill free speech and are not committed to privacy, authentication, or long-term preservation. Attendees will learn about the mobile application Save by OpenArchive, which aims to foster a virtual commons where civil liberties are protected, and media retains its provenance once shared online.
Organizing the Archive: The Union Makes Us Strong
Chair: Trisha Lendo, Film Archivist, Motion Picture Editors Guild Member and Los Angeles Tenants Union Organizer
Common topics at AMIA conferences and on the AMIA listserv are low pay, a lack of benefits, and the abuse of contract employees. One tool we all have as workers is organizing our workplace no matter what the size or type. Over the last few years many industries have found strength and improvements through their unions including teachers, grocery store workers, and graduate students and many archivists can be doing the same. Where should you start? What Union should you join? What are your legal protections? This panel will consist of archivists from a variety of unions and institutions who will share their experiences and take questions. Institutions of many shapes and sizes will be examined including labs, libraries, studios, and an institution as small as a historical society. The goal of this panel is to empower archivists to unionize for better working conditions, better pay, and workplace safety. This pop-up session also hopes to connect archivist who are already in unions to share their strategies and contacts. The ideas and conversation in this panel are just a start to an ongoing and larger movement of film archivist advocating for their rights by unionizing.
The Oral History Association’s Archival Principles and Best Practices Release
Chair: Steven Kent Sielaff, Baylor University Institute for Oral History
Purpose: In October 2019 the Oral History Association (OHA) is expected to approve the newest addendum to its Principles and Best Practices documentation: a section specifically on archiving oral history. This addition follows the complete revision of the base best practices document in 2018. This session will discuss the contents of both, sharing with the AMIA membership the latest official positions of the OHA on proper oral history practice.
Intended Audience: With the creation of a new AMIA oral history committee this year, plus the addition of a day-long pre-conference oral history workshop, there should be a sizable audience of both experienced and initiate oral historians among the attendees of AMIA 2019. This session will serve as a wonderful entry point to the professional standards of the OHA. Session Plan: The session will be led by Steven Sielaff, who was involved in the Archives addendum creation process and served as its editor. The base Principles and Best Practices document is currently available online. The first half of the session will be spent highlighting specific areas of this document and fielding questions. The second half will be similarly dedicated to the Archives addendum, which will be available as a handout during the session due to its imminent release. During this half Steven will also share updates on the work of the OHA Metadata Task Force, of which he is the current chair.
Redefining Your Career Path: How We Got Here
Chair: Kendra Long, 4S Bay LLC/Sociedad Amigos de los Ninos
We will be exploring the decisions we have made both to enter the field and to land at our current jobs. The process from the outside often seems nebulous, and in a highly competitive field it can be difficult to get advice on what sorts of jobs employers look upon favorably or not, so we are hoping to bridge the gap between seasoned professionals and those new to the field, to discuss what we studied, what jobs we took, what worked for us and how we got to where we are now. The goal is to share a variety of experiences and paths we have taken, to prove that there is no ‘right’ way to do it.
Addressing sync issues with sepmag material
Chair: Paul Englebert, SINeMA
I’ve been working the last five years as manager of the film digitizing laboratory of the Belgian national French speaking television archiving service named Sonuma. Most of the material we must digitize is 16mm sepmag from the years 1950’s to end of 1970’s. It shows vinegar syndrome degradations. With shrinkage around two or three percent. Sometimes more. Running the sound in sync with the image during digitization is not feasible. I decided five years ago to grab image and sound separately. And to synchronize on an editing software in a second operation. It appears to be a good solution since our productivity was more than twice the productivity of our competitors. The synchronizing step represent nearly 25% of the whole digitizing cost. With operators working 3 hours to synchronize one hour of material.
With an AI Company, I am working on a program that will synchronize automatically the sound on the image. The automatic synchronization has as goal to put in sync with the image an uncompressed WAV sound file. The image stream is generally 25 fps. It can sometimes be 24, sometimes 30. But the image signal doesn’t move. Since the shorter unity in a video is an image, and if we have 25 images per second, we can add or cut 40 milliseconds (unit of time corresponding to one image) of audio to keep it as synced as possible with the image. Our special problem is that the audio is constantly going a bit too fast, and then a bit too slow. Existing solutions sync the sound once, and then it doesn’t move anymore. I would be able to present a proof of concept at the AMIA 2019 Excuse my poor English, I’m natively French speaking.
Technology Mythology (And Other Practical Information)
Chair: Eric Wenocur, Lab Tech Systems
A system for capture and preservation of audio and video media brings together a range of technologies–analog, digital, old and new. In some cases there is a right way or a best practice for a particular process, other times more than one approach can work. But in all cases there are fundamental concepts dictated by the technology itself. If these concepts are not understood (or misinformation gets around) the result can be confusion, wasted time, wasted money, and possibly poor quality. Focusing mainly on playback and capture hardware, this presentation will explore a handful of fundamental technical concepts that may be misunderstood or overlooked by media archivists. We will touch on topics such as genlock, lip-sync, connection errors, equipment power, and others that arise whenever archivists use video and audio technology. The approach will be a simple case-by-case explanation of the concepts, and is appropriate for participants at all experience levels that work directly with A/V equipment. (This session may be a good adjunct to James Snyder’s Tuesday workshop “Audiovisual & Preservation Technology Basics for Non-Engineers.”)
Developing Visual Guides for Capture Station Setup
Chair: Jackie Jay, Steve Silver Productions, Inc.
Presenting a visual guide developed to support the American Archive of Public Broadcasting’s Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship, which is in its third round this semester. This document was intentionally visual in design in order to supplement the hands-on immersion week training that the fellows and their MLIS professors and technical mentors participated in as they were responsible for setting up their capture stations when they returned home. Although the equipment listed is specific to the needs of this particular project (capturing closed captioning from U-matic, Betacam, BetacamSP, Digibeta and DVCPro) the basic concepts outlined in the guide can be applied to the setup of any videotape capture station.
The setup is broken down into three “easy” steps: 1.) Powering Up All Equipment, 2.) Synchronizing the Signals and 3.) Connecting the Signal Chain. Here is a link to the guide, to an article on it on the AAPB’s blog, and to a Twitter post which features the document being presented as this semester’s fellows and their MLIS instructors get to know the equipment for the first time.
The speakers for this session would ideally be 1.) one or more of the fellows, 2.) one of the MLIS professors mentoring a fellow, 3.) myself as the creator of the documentation (and as technical advisor for the capture station setup) and 4.) a representative from the AAPB. I or possibly someone from the AAPB might be available to chair the session. My apologies for not having a session chair finalized at this time.