2016 Poster Sessions
A poster presentation is one in which information is summarized using texts and images, and presented in a poster format. This is an excellent opportunity to highlight your repository, a digitization project, a research project or other initiative, and share your work with your colleagues. More information is available here: xxx link to website.
Poster sessions will be November 10 and 11 (12-2pm) in the Vendor Cafe area of the conference hotel.
Poster: International Cooperation in the Archives: Audiovisual Archiving at the UN
- Antonio Carlos da Silva, United Nations. DPI
- Carmel Curtis United Nations. DPI
Established in 1945 after World War II, the United Nations works to prevent conflict, help parties in conflict make peace, and create the conditions to allow peace to hold and flourish. The Audiovisual Archive of the UN holds over 100,000 assets of recordings of meetings, events, conferences, UNTV and Radio programmes, concerts, interviews, footage from UN missions, and more. Existing on a range of formats including 16/35mm film,a plethora of video and audio formats, and original photographs, the collection is home to unique and significant moments throughout the history of the World Organization . Currently, the majority of the materials in the Archive exist only on analog formats subject to inherent degradation, equipment obsolescence and other threats. In the summer of 2016, the UN Audiovisual Archive launched a five year mass-digitization project thanks to a generous grant from the Sultanate of Oman.The goal of this international collaborative project is twofold. First, we will focus on the long-term preservation of analog audiovisual materials with an emphasis on planning for their stewardship as digital objects. Second, the historic recordings will eventually be made accessible online for educational, research, journalistic, or other purposes. Our poster will concentrate on the success and challenges faced thus far, particularly with the established MAMS implemented at the UN, as well as adopted policies, procedures and workflows. The UN specific environment and the unique nature of the collection will also be stressed in the context of existing standards, procedures and best practices.
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Poster: Capturing Campus-Wide Born Digital Moving Images: A Collaboration
- Chrystal Carpenter, Elon University
- Linda Lashendock Elon University
This poster will discuss a campus-wide initiative lead by the University Archives and Special Collections to select and implement a software solution to streamline and enhance the management of terabytes of born-digital moving image content created by various departments across campus each year. We will explore the collaborative efforts between University Archives and Special Collections and the major contributors and creators of moving image media such as University Communications and Athletics to create a robust, nimble, and customizable workflow unique to each unit while ensuring a straight-forward mechanism to allow for the appraisal and selection of moving image media assets of archival value. The workflow solutions mentioned will include information on tagging and metadata creation, internal and external access, and short and long term preservation. Legacy content and software crosswalks will also be discussed.
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Poster: Moving Image Social Tagging Professional vs. Amateur Production Comparison
- Edward Benoit, III, School of Library & Information Science
The variability of moving image records and their dynamic nature create many unique description and access challenges for archivists. Social tagging could provide solutions to these issues, and research on the associated variables, such as video length and genre, would focus archivists’ use of tagging to the most beneficial environments. This project compares the user-generated tags of amateur and professional videos, and addressing the following research question: What are the similarities and differences between user-generated description of amateur and professionally produced videos? Five hundred participants viewed and created tags for a short (5 minute) online video. Participants were randomly divided between amateur and professional videos. Both the amateur and professional videos contained similar variables, such as sound, narration, and subject matter. The high number of participants produced a large population of tags whose subsequent analysis identified the strengths and limitations of moving image tagging through open-coding analysis and descriptive statistics. Subsequent comparison with previous tagging studies of photographs and textual documents further differentiates the findings. Combined with a previous study presented at AMIA 2015, the findings provide concrete best practice recommendations for repositories interested in integrating social tags within their digital collections. This study is funded by a grant from the Society of American Archivists Foundation.
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Poster: Baby Steps: How Digitization Projects Help Community Archives Measure Resource Needs
- Itza Carbajal, University of Texas at Austin School of Information
This research looks at how digitization projects can help aspiring community archives gauge the necessary resources to maintain archival repositories that include access to both paper based and digital records as well as sound preservation practices. Currently, little research exists in regards to the various necessary steps community groups must consider when establishing their own independent archives. By using the case study of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center’s recent audiovisual digitization project, the researcher hopes to pinpoint key elements that community archives should contemplate when deciding whether to continue the work needed to maintain an archival repository.
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Poster: Mobile Archivists: Archival Outreach on the Go
- Jennifer Barth, University of Wisconsin-Madison
- Catherine Hannula University of Wisconsin-Madison
The fight for relevance can include everyone from aging pop stars to traditional media. Archives are no different-they need to assert their efficacy. That means also reaching out to patrons who want to learn how to preserve their own memories themselves, even if they are not within ready access of professional archivists. As UW-Madison archives graduate students, we wanted to reach these patrons. Alongside Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research archivist Amy Sloper, we became literal mobile archivists in July of 2016, holding personal digitization workshops across rural northern Wisconsin, where we digitized videotapes, audiotapes, photographs, slides, and documents for local area residents. Our poster will illustrate our workflow through event photos and our event poster. We formed partnerships with the Bayfield Carnegie Library, the Barnes Area Historical Association, the Chippewa Valley Museum, and the L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library, who helped us with local promotion. Planning for these events included: designing and printing posters; distributing press releases to local media outlets; gathering the necessary digitization equipment, like VCRs, audio cassette decks, flatbed scanners, Digital8 and DV decks, VHS-C adapters, laptops, and converter boxes, and participating in training for all equipment; designing, researching, and staging mini-exhibits of local interest at each venue; and arranging travel and workshop logistics. This process culminated in three personal digitization workshops tailored to each community’s interest and need. At all three workshops, patrons requested more workshops be held. Their enthusiasm highlights the importance of these events in smaller communities across the United States.
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Poster: A/V Geeks 24 Hour Watch-a-thon Post Mortem
- Skip Elsheimer, AV Geeks LLC
- K Sean Finch A/V Geeks
The A/V Geeks Educational Film Archive recently held a 24 hour Watch-a-thon where they watched over 100 16mm films from their collection, digitized them and streamed it all live online on Facebook. They share their strategy, reasoning behind doing this event, what worked and what needed work in the process, so that other archives can host their own events.
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Poster: Out of the Classroom and Into the Archive
- Tyler Bequette, Washington University Film & Media Archive
“Out of the Classroom and Into the Archive” is a poster seeking to highlight the substantial collection of educational films and supplementary teaching guides housed at the Washington University Film & Media Archive. With this poster, it is our hope to not only tell the rest of the archiving community about this valuable resource for researchers, but also demonstrate to other archives one of the ways in which an ever growing collection such as this can be managed. This will be achieved through the discussion of three main sections: the provenance of the films; the processing and cataloguing of the collection, including the challenges that arose during the project and the decisions made; as well as the ways in which the archive is working to make these materials accessible to the public. The collection contains approximately 12,500 16mm educational films spanning three different school districts in both Missouri and New York, and was acquired over several years. Processing included a massive effort from staff and student workers to inventory, dust, test for Vinegar Syndrome, and move to their permanent location. Challenges and decisions reflecting storage concerns, assessment, organization, and more will be discussed. Finally, attention will be made to the archive’s forms of outreach. These include public screenings through our own event, Rawstock-a free screening night of educational films, complete with educational film bingo and prizes; digital access to the teaching guides through a Hydra-based repository; and through on-site appointments with researchers.
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Poster: Uncovering Nazi Germany in a Deteriorating Home Movie Collection
- Jen O’Leary, UCLA MIAS Student
As a student in Snowden Becker’s UCLA MIAS Home Movie class, a group of us were tasked with processing a collection of films loaned to us by UCLA History Department staff member Ann Major. Upon opening the box of films she had given us, we were struck with the distinct smell of vinegar syndrome, and greeted with reels that had been fused together and film that was coming apart in our hands. A few films, including those labeled as “Germany 1933” and “Germany 1934” proved to be in much better condition, and we inspected and digitized the films. Title cards describing “Hitlerjugend” and “Herr Hitler” followed by the Hitler Youth and Hitler himself in elaborate parades grabbed our attention, and upon further discussions with Ann Major, we learned that her grandfather had been on an academic assignment in Germany during the 1930s and these films were his travelogues, documenting his time in Europe. Our next challenge was to determine the future homes for the 42 reels of historically important deteriorating film. Other than the reels of film depicting Europe in the 1930s, the collection also included commencement footage from US colleges in the 1940s, and family vacations in New England in the 1950s. Due to the varied nature of the collection, we decided to divide up the films and donate them to specialized archives. Donation agreements are currently being negotiated with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Yale Film Study Center, and the Center for Home Movies.
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Poster: FADGI DPX Embedded Metadata Project
- Bleakley McDowell, National Museum of African American History & Culture
- Christina Kovac NARA
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Poster: CUNY TV QC Workflows
- Catriona Schlosser, CUNY TV
This poster will explore open source tools such as QC Tools, FFmpeg and MediaInfo, that CUNY Television uses to assess and QC their digitized assets. CUNY TV digitizes up to 20 videotapes a day, and as a result, the CUNY TV library staff had to devise a QC workflow that efficiently analyzes these newly digitized files. Adopting open source tools has given CUNY TV a unique and accessible way to QC the station’s ongoing analog video digitization efforts.
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Poster: PREFORMA and MediaConch: Open Source Tools for Long-term Preservation
- Erwin Verbruggen, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision
A memory institution needs to know the files they create are healthy. Similarly, for born digital assets, they need to validate their structure, too. If a file is malformed upon arrival, this must be known upon ingest. Whether the institution’s policies say that the error should be corrected (and thus change the original), or note the flaw in the metadata, a memory institution needs the tools that fit this purpose. The main objective of the PREFORMA project is to give memory institutions these types of tools – by developing a set that enables the testing process to happen under the memory institution’s control. In the European Union-funded PREFORMA project, public memory institutions pooled their resources to work with experts at small and medium-sized companies. After a selection and early design process, three consortia were awarded contracts to do standardization work on an open source format for, respectively, documents, still images and video. Additionally, they were asked to develop a toolset to do conformance checks, and correct remaining errors in the build-up of incoming or existing files. This poster gives an overview of the three tools that were created to check whether the PDF, TIFF or FFV1/MKV files adhere to their standard specification, with a main focus on the development of the MediaConch tool and CElLAR standardization activity.
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Poster: Smithsonian Institution Pan-Institutional Audiovisual Survey
- Kelli Hix, Smithsonian Institution
The Smithsonian Institution is the holder of vast, complex, and unique audiovisual collections within multiple units. In order to better understand these collections and inform decisions about the future of audiovisual preservation at the Smithsonian, eight units are engaging in a one-year, pan-institutional audiovisual collections survey that aims to gather information about current preservation and access practices, media condition, and content. The survey has two components: The first is a narrative section describing collection content, unit workflows, and areas of greatest need. The second, the “Big Count”, is a collection-level inventory gathering information on how much av media exists within the eight units. We are currently in the final stage of data gathering and moving forward with the creation of our report on collections care and long-term planning. Our poster for this year’s poster session is a graphic representation conveying the work of the year-long audiovisual survey. The posters have been designed specifically for the AMIA conference by Washington, D.C. based artist and illustrator, Aurélie Beatley. Each poster was hand silk-screened by Grand Palace Silkscreen in Nashville, TN. An extremely limited run of 50 numbered posters will be given out for free to the first interested AMIA attendees who visit our poster booth. Our goal is to share our methodologies and practices with our colleagues, to spark discussion about ideas and experiences, and to provide a unique souvenir supporting the Washington, D.C. arts community. We hope you’ll stop by to engage with us and pick up a poster!
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Poster: Data Visualisation – How Can We Make the Most of What We Have?
- Nick D Richardson, Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI)
With a collection of 160,000 items dating back to the 1890s and covering a tremendously wide range of topics how do we present catalogue data in an engaging fashion? Can we harness automated process to present the data in more visually appealing ways as well as facilitate novel ways of exploration. How can we link our dataset to those of other institutions to open up new fields of research. How do we share these experiences? ACMI has recently launched a new online Collection Explorer and released its dataset via GitHub under a Creative Commons Zero licence to foster exploration.
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Poster: Archivematica-MediaConch Integration
- Sarah Romkey, Artefactual Systems
This poster will describe the process the of designing and implementing an integration between Archivematica, an open-source digital preservation platform, and MediaConch, an implementation checker, policy checker and reporter for Matroska, FFV1 and PCM files. This integration is currently in progress by Artefactual Systems, lead developer of Archivematica, in partnership with MediaArea, developers of MediaConch, and funded by the PREFORMA project. The poster will discuss use cases and workflows for using MediaConch as a micro-service tool within Archivematica, including format conformance and policy checking.
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Poster: “Building With Service”: The Audiovisual Content of the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company
- Shani Miller, UCLA Library
The UCLA Library is digitizing the audiovisual materials and photographs in the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company collection, with the goal of making these items more widely accessible to the public. When William J. Nickerson, Jr., George A. Beavers, Jr., and Norman O. Houston founded the company in 1925, few opportunities existed in the Los Angeles area for African American residents to purchase insurance, the result of discriminatory high rates or outright bans. Until it ceased operations in 2009, Golden State Mutual served as one of a few home-based Black insurance companies in Los Angeles. For more than eighty years, the company actively documented its corporate history as well as the broader history of African Americans in California through painting, sculpture, photography, and filmmaking. Among the highlights in the collection are 16mm films of the company’s annual picnics in 1947 and 1958, and a 1957 tour of the Home Office (designed by Paul R. Williams) featuring two special guests – Lena Horne and Joe Louis. This poster presentation offers as a preview of the moving image content and photographs in this historic collection.
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Poster: From Analog to Digital: A VHS Digitization Workflow
- Treshani Perera, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee
Playback equipment for consumer-level video tapes such as Video Home System (VHS) are at the verge of becoming obsolete. Yet most libraries, archives, museums, and cultural organizations still continue to possess numerous VHS tapes among their holdings. With the growing need and demand for digital content, archivists, librarians, and museum curators are in a race to digitize consumer-level video tapes before their content is lost to the world. This poster will present a workflow for the digitization of VHS tapes. While an intern at Marquette University Archives and Special Collections, the presenter created the VHS Digitization Workflow as a means of making recommendations to move forward with in-house digitization of VHS tapes. The digitization process can be emulated using a VHS tape deck, an analog-to-digital converter, and capture software. The workflow demonstrates how analog data in VHS tapes can be captured as a digital file using Adobe Premier Pro software. The software program was available at the repository, and was therefore adopted for the workflow. Basic editing and adding a time stamp are also covered in this workflow. This workflow illustrates an in-house method of capturing content from VHS tapes to create low-resolution digital access copies.
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Poster: The Cable Bible: A Guide to Connecting Audiovisual Equipment
- Ethan Gates, New York University
Ever wondered what the difference really is between “balanced” and “unbalanced” audio? Or whether you can use an i.Link cord for a FireWire connection? What’s this enormous cable with 75 pin connectors, screws and what appears to be an occult symbol branded on it that we found at the bottom of the tech closet, anyway? The Cable Bible hopes to answer all these questions and more. A collaborative, comprehensive online guide to the various cables and connections used in audiovisual preservation, analog and digital, The Cable Bible offers clear, concise descriptions of signal types, data protocols, wiring, and much more to make this technical aspect of setting up and using A/V equipment more accessible to all archivists. Come learn more about how you can use The Cable Bible (a free and open resource available on Github) for education and identification – or, more importantly, contribute! This is a continually growing project that needs your input to become as informative and approachable as possible.
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Poster: Discovering the Inner World of Edward and Naomi Feil
- Robert Anen, New York University
- Lydia Creech Indiana University
Here at Indiana University Libraries’ Moving Image Archive, we have begun to process The Edward and Naomi Feil Collection, who were a husband and wife team who made it their mission to help those who could no longer communicate in conventional ways. The Feils wrote and directed The Inner World of Aphasia that was recently added to the National Film Registry and screened at The Orphans Film Symposium this past April. The home movies in this collection have also proven to be beneficial as a research tool and are aiding the Library of Congress in the restoration of a film shown at the 1964 World’s Fair, Think. This poster highlights both the Feil films that precede and proceed The Inner World of Aphasia as well as their home movies. All of which are unique in terms of how they break away from the stereotypical styles of documentaries, industrial films and home movies by telling stories from unsuspected perspectives. Please take a minute to discover the inner world of Edward and Naomi Feil.