Vote for Pop-Up Sessions at AMIA 2018!

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. The three proposals with the most votes will be presented as sessions in Portland.   All AMIA members eligible to vote.  Please vote only once.

Deadline for casting your vote:  Friday, September 21st.

Streaming Video: Research Collections and Film Studies
Chair:  Nancy Friedland, Columbia University

Academic research libraries include in their mission statement the desire to collect materials in multiple formats to support the teaching and learning activities of their institution. With the advent of the videocassette and later DVD format in the early 2000s, libraries collected film content in a traditional model of acquiring a tangible object, the right of first sale, and traditional practices of cataloging, preserving, and making these items accessible through loan or in library use. Simultaneously, film studies programs grew at a rapid pace. There was a growth in the scholarly output as researchers had access to the object of study in this non-print format. Today, libraries are faced with numerous challenges in the “collecting” of streaming film content, the latest in a continued format evolution for moving images intended for either the large or small screen. The most important factor in this new format is the support of film studies on both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Expectations for streaming video by students and faculty are at an unsurprisingly all-time high but the actual content required for research and instruction is not as available compared to what libraries were able (and continue) to collect in DVD format. This paper will examine large-scale and niche services and the sustainability of this format, the challenges of Netflix and the lack of educational license for in-demand content, the long term preservation of commercially accessible moving image content, cost, and examine the essential question of how this new format change will impact the current and future study of film.

User Core Acted Train Scripts for Ann Hans Tanned Gauge Meant
Chair:  Casey Davis Kaufman, WGBH

The American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) has digitized and preserved over 50,000 hours of public broadcasting content. Post 1990 TV content has CEA608/Line21 that is converted to text that can be used for free text search.  Most content lacks Line21. WGBH uses a variety of technologies for speech to text conversion. This leads to awareness, engagement and discoverability. FIX IT and FIX IT+ are web tools that users access to proof read and correct transcribed audio. George Blood is sponsoring a challenge to public broadcasting outlets – for each program your viewers complete, another tape will be digitized. The result: User Corrected Transcripts for Enhanced Engagement.

Targeted toward archivists seeking to improve access to their collections and engage with users, this session will report on 1) tools for speech-to-text transcripts; 2) tools for crowdsourcing; and 3) innovative ways of engaging content creators and the crowd through incentivized approaches to preservation and access.    Speakers will include Karen Cariani, George Blood, and Casey Davis Kaufman.

Roundtable on the Future of the AMIA Preservation Committee
Chair:  Anne Marie Kelly, Greg Wilsbacher, Carla Arton, AMIA Preservation Committee

Since its inception, the Preservation Committee has been a foundational part of AMIA’s mission to preserve and use moving image media worldwide. Through resource development such as fact sheets and storage standards and guidelines, the Preservation Committee has been dedicated to addressing the needs of media archivists in the field. However, the committee has had little activity and membership involvement in recent years.

This roundtable is intended as a next step in the Preservation Committee’s evolution, reintroducing the Committee to the AMIA membership at large, so that all members can come to discuss the role of the future role of the Preservation Committee. The co-chairs (Carla Arton, Anne Kelly and Greg Wilsbacher) will each speak briefly in order to pose organizational and structural questions for the audience to discuss. Topics will include: evolving and overlapping committee functions, possible sub-committees for the Preservation Committee and a review of recent media preservation activity outside of AMIA proper.

We seek an open pop-up session so that we can engage a wide audience beyond those already on the Preservation Committee roster so that the future work of the committee is shaped by the voice of AMIA as a whole. If at all possible we would ask that the pop-up session happen prior to the scheduled Preservation Committee meeting. This would allow the committee meeting to be devoted to action items rather than general discussion.

Overview of IASA-TC 06 Guidelines for the Preservation of Video Recordings
Chair:  George Blood, George Blood Audio/Video/Film/Data

Publications of the IASA TC are some of the most frequently sited documents in audiovisual preservation. This session will introduce the newly published Guidelines for the Preservation of Video Recordings, IASA-TC 06 from the Technical Committee (TC) of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA).  The sections in the initial version focus on videotape recordings.

Two parts of the guideline describe relatively settled matters: (1) “what is video,” which outlines the technical complexity of the underlying formats, and (2) detailed information about the conventional carriers held by many archives: 2-inch and 1-inch open reels, U-matic videocassettes, ½-inch consumer and semi-professional videocassettes, and the Betacam family of professional videocassettes.

The guideline also discusses matters for which there is less consensus and/or for which practices are not yet mature, e.g., the selection of digital target formats and methods for the capture of non-audiovisual signals such as captioning and historical timecodes.  In addition, the guideline offers a high-level overview of a preservation facility, intended to guide archivists planning either a self-operation or selecting contractors.    Future versions of the guideline will add information digital-file-based video formats.  Comments are sought on the current draft; a revised draft is planned for 2019.

George Blood, one of the guideline’s authors, will present a brief slide show that provides an overview of the guideline.  He will then lead a group discussion of the work, collecting comments to take back to the TC for consideration.

Spelling Stewardship Success: Y Is There No U in NDSR?
Chair:  Snowden Becker, NDSR Advisory Group / UCLA Dept. of Information Studies

Audiovisual archives and media preservation initiatives face some of the toughest digital stewardship issues around. This field continues to attract smart, talented people who are eager to work on finding practical, sustainable, and scalable solutions to our grand challenges. How do we identify those stewardship challenges as they emerge, and promote strategic approaches and effective tools for addressing them? How can we nurture those emerging professionals and match them with sites where their skills can be put to use? And where is the money for all of this going to come from?

The National Digital Stewardship Residency (NDSR) program was established in 2013 with a pilot project developed by the Library of Congress in cooperation with the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Its goal: To build a community of experts who will advance our nation’s capabilities in managing, preserving, and making accessible the digital record of human achievement. In 2016, WGBH and the American Archive of Public Broadcasting applied the NDSR’s cohort-based, experiential learning model to audiovisual collections across the U.S. And in 2018, a National Digital Stewardship Residency (NDSR) Advisory Group formed to foster and promote digital stewardship across disciplines through strategic initiatives, research, partnerships, and standards development.     AMIA’s individual and institutional members are a key constituency within the digital preservation community, and part of NDSR’s future. In the first half of this session, NDSR Advisory Group members will summarize our work this year; share tools, resources, and updates from past NDSR projects; and discuss future plans, with special emphasis on projects of interest to AMIA’s membership. In the second half of this session, we’ll open up the floor to audience members for discussion and brainstorming. The next big NDSR project can—and should—start coming together here!
Community Archiving case study: Preserving DC’s LGBTQ video history
Chair:  Nathan Avant, Rainbow History ProjectThe Rainbow History Project (RHP) is a community archive focused on preserving and promoting the history of Washington DC’s LGBTQ community. In 2017, RHP was entrusted with the video tape archives of One In Ten People, a groundbreaking community-produced public access  gay and lesbian newsmagazine that aired on DC Metro Area in the 1990s. Outsourcing digitization was beyond their means, but RHP was able to leverage connections with other regional institutions, reference publicly available crowdsourced workflows, and utilize open source software tools developed by the AV archives community to transcend a lack of resources and launch a successful in-house video digitization program.This session will detail the process of building Rainbow History Project’s video digitization program. Archivist Nathan Avant will discuss the building of their video digitization program from the planning stage through cataloging and uploading to the Internet Archive for access, focusing particularly on the way that community connections and resources enabled RHP to quickly and inexpensively build its video digitization capacity.  Finally, he will discuss RHP’s future plans to further build their video digitization capacity and form additional partnerships in order to rescue as much of Washington DC’s LGBTQ community’s analog video history as possible.

Attendees to this session will hear a firsthand account of how RHP was able to apply the work of the larger AV Archives community in order to preserve DC’s LGBTQ history. Successes and failures met along the way will be discussed, as well as lessons learned. The session will explore the advantages and disadvantages of the open source and DIY approach as experienced by RHP, and specific tools and workflows that have proved useful to us will be highlighted. Attendees will also learn more about the Rainbow History Project’s One In Ten People collection and see a sampling of the digitized video.

Let’s Play Together: Extending IIIF to Moving Image and Audio
Chair:  Jon W. Dunn, Indiana University Bloomington

Access to image-based resources is fundamental to research, scholarship and the transmission of cultural knowledge. Yet many of the Internet’s image-based resources are locked up in silos, with access only available via locally-built or commercially-developed discovery and access applications. The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) effort (https://iiif.io/) is a collaboration of the world’s leading research libraries and image repositories working to produce an interoperable technology and community framework for image delivery on the Web.

The IIIF standards effort began in 2011, with a focus on still images. Today, hundreds of institutions large and small and developers of multiple commercial and open source software systems have implemented these standards. Since early 2016, a number of interested institutions and individuals have been working within the IIIF community to extend IIIF standards to audio and moving image content. This will allow institutions to make media content available on the Web in a standards-based way that enables reuse of media within other applications such as viewers and scholarly annotation tools, while retaining needed attribution information and access restrictions. An Alpha release 3.0 of the IIIF Presentation API standard was released earlier this year, based on linked data, JSON, and standard World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) protocols such as Web Annotation.

This session will present an introduction to IIIF, with a focus on IIIF’s emerging support for audio and moving image content; illustrate use cases supported by IIIF for research, teaching, and learning; and demonstrate media repository, viewer, and annotation tools that make use of IIIF’s audio and moving image features. The session will be aimed at archivists and librarians who manage and provide access to audio and moving image collections, as well as to those potentially interested in implementing IIIF standards in their access systems or research tools.

Radical Privacy for Media Archivists : A Collective Cryptoparty
Chair:  Ariel Hahn, UCLA

The purpose of this session is to create a space wherein participants can discuss and find practical ways to engage with privacy, security, and anonymity in their archives. As we become more and more dependent on computers as the hosts of our collections as well as the sites of so much future collection creation, media archivists have been propelled into a digital realm that poses new risks for archivists, holding institutions, as well as the people represented in our collections. The organizers will come prepared with a structured list of accessible steps participants can take to regain some control of their data, whether that be an introductory guide to securing your cellphone or a more advanced how to be more anonymous online. The session will then open into a collective conversation about the changing landscape of ethics and privacy in media archiving. With so many experienced archivists in attendance at AMIA alongside students and emerging professionals, the hour-long session promises to be an engaging hybrid between instructional workshop, skill-share, and open conversation. There will be several pre-determined tracks or conversation leads that could center our event, though the outcome will depend on the audience in attendance as well as their interests, expertise, and needs.