Preliminary Program
Sessions
Tales from the Vinegar Room: practical experiences with decaying acetate
Janine Winfree, George Eastman Museum
Deborah Steinmetz, Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive
All triacetate film is at risk of vinegar syndrome. Once decaying acetate material is identified, it is typically quarantined into a vault some might refer to as a “vinegar room.” How does an institution deal with their vinegar room? What are our obligations as archivists to decaying acetate material that poses a health risk not only to our collections, but to ourselves? Two panelists will present their practical experiences with vinegar rooms, including the history of the vinegar room at their institutions and how they have tackled creating an inventory or a preservation strategy for the materials therein. The experiences of these two panelists will spark a discussion on how institutions can evaluate their own storage, cataloging, and preservation of decaying triacetate materials. Collections management of materials is at the forefront of this discussion: how do institutions decide which material is too decayed to keep in their collection? How do we effectively quarantine decaying materials in order to minimize the risk to other safety film? The findings of these two panelists will help answer these questions and perhaps drive others to create a realistic strategy for their own institutional vinegar rooms.
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Building on Samvera Open Source Audiovisual Collections Management Systems
Casey Davis Kaufman, WGBH
Karen Cariani, WGBH
Jon Dunn, Indiana University
Irene Taylor, Washington University
This presentation will discuss building and using an open source community supported system to manage audiovisual materials. WGBH Educational Foundation, Washington University in St. Louis, and Indiana University will discuss their challenges and successes of building applications for AV content and metadata management based on the Samvera digital repository framework and its Hyrax and Avalon Media System “solution bundles.” The panelists will discuss features, components, and demonstrate advantages of using new standards from IIIF for interoperability of AV content and researcher needs.
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Preserving Projection: Documenting History, Heritage, and Practices
Meghan Bouffard, Simmons University
Spencer Christiano, George Eastman Museum
Sheryl Smith, George Eastman Museum
Sam Lane, George Eastman Museum
Jesse Crooks, Renew Theaters, Inc.
Part discussion, part demonstration, this panel will explore film projection and its importance as part of our cultural heritage along with methods being used to ensure its preservation. There will be a projection demonstration, followed by individual presentations and a panel discussion centered around film projection’s cultural importance and supporting community. Discussion points will include history of projectionists, human components of projection, documenting practices, and the importance of film projection as cultural heritage. This panel asserts that preserving the practice of film projection is integral to the broader mission of preserving moving image media.
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Home Movie Digitization and Access: New Models for Outreach
Dwight Swanson, The Center for Home Movies
Siobhan Hagan, DC Public Library
Patricia Villon, Center for Asian American Media
Kirsten Larvick, Al Larvick Conservation Fund
Ina Archer, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC)
Inspired in part by personal digital archiving, community archives, and Home Movie Day, many archivists are no longer satisfied with solely being custodians of home movies in a centralized archive, but instead are developing a new paradigm through outreach to specific communities and assisting them directly with home movie conservation, digitization, and access. This session showcases four projects that are breaking new ground in the area of home movies. Digitization is central to all of the programs, but each of them expands upon that core mission in different ways to make their donors’ films and videos accessible to the family members and the public, while also contextualizing the media through additional projects such as oral histories, public events, and numerous forms of contextualization.
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Share That Knowledge! Developing Strategies for
Knowledge-Sharing about Audiovisual Archives
Karen F. Gracy, Kent State University
Catherine Gadbois-Laurendeau, Cinémathèque québécoise
Erwin Verbruggen, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision
The transfer of knowledge across generations of archivists within an institution is an essential part of the preservation of audiovisual heritage. While some areas of knowledge are easily recognizable and documented, it is the tacit or intangible knowledge an archivist holds that is in most danger of being lost. Systematic knowledge transfer is rarely acknowledged and undertaken in a methodical manner. While institutions may have their own individual methods of passing on knowledge, these methods are rarely articulated and shared through published research. Thus, this panel focuses on knowledge sharing in the field of audiovisual archiving as a part of the research project Share That Knowledge! Finding Strategies for Passing on Knowledge Across Generations of Archivists. This three-year project brings together archive affiliates from thirteen AV archiving institutions who will conduct research aimed at formulating a set of successful methods and strategies for passing on knowledge within audiovisual archives.
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Preservación dos veces/Preservation Twice: Preserving Early Puerto Rican Radio
Linda Tadic, Digital Bedrock
Dr. Luis Rosario Albert, Ana G. Méndez University, Gurabo Campus
Francisco J. Cabrera Mercado, WIPR, Puerto Rico Public Broadcasting Corporation
Jim Lindner, Media Matters
Puerto Rico public radio station WIPR went on the air in 1949. In 2006, the station received an NEH grant to preserve 5,000 hours of its early radio broadcasts of news, music, and radio dramas that were recorded on ¼” audio reels starting in 1957. After digitization to WAV files, the IT department wrote the files to LTO3 tapes for data storage. Thirteen years later, the LTO3 tapes could not be read: there was no documentation of how the tapes were written in those pre-LTFS days. The content had to undergo a second wave of preservation, this time to determine how the files were written to LTO3, and sleuthing to identify and procure the correct hardware, operating system, and backup software with which to restore the files. The session is a case study on the complex factors involved in preserving digital content on legacy digital storage media.
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Improving Metadata in DPX Files: Tools and Guidelines from FADGI
Kate Murray, Library of Congress
Bertram Lyons, AVP
Criss Austin, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)
The US Federal Agency Digital Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) Audio-visual Working Group, in conjunction with AVP and PortalMedia, has released embARC (Metadata Embedded for Archival Content), a new free open source tool to manage internal file metadata. embARC includes flexibility functionality for DPX files which enables users to audit and correct internal metadata of both individual files or an entire DPX sequence while not impacting the image data to support FADGI’s Guidelines for Embedded Metadata within DPX File Headers for Digitized Motion Picture Film. The FADGI Guidelines and its supporting research explored gaps and ambiguities within the SMPTE 268 standard document; embARC was created to implement proposed solutions. The FADGI team is working on adding capacity for other formats beyond DPX including MXF and beyond.
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Workshops in Progress: Community Archiving Workshop Training of Trainers Project
Moriah Ulinskas, Independent Consultant
Kelli Hix, Nashville Metro Archives / Independent
Pamela Vadakan, California Revealed
Amy Sloper, Harvard Film Archive
The Community Archiving Workshop (CAW) has been a one-day workshop at the AMIA Annual Conference since 2011. Its mission is to help regional community groups learn to identify and preserve their legacy recordings. The work of CAW has meant that diverse communities are developing the capacity to safeguard their audiovisual materials and make unique regional cultural recordings more available. This session will report on the progress of the CAW Training of Trainers project. Funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) with the generous support of AMIA, this project aims to produce a series of regional workshops which will address the problem of obsolescence in audiovisual collections.
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Say Yes to Assessment: Three Approaches to Moving Image Collection Management
Courtney Holschuh, The Museum of Modern Art
Theo Harrison, The Museum of Modern Art
Brian Meacham, Yale University Film Study Center
Jen O’Leary, NBCUniversal
The benefits of collection assessment range from richer database records, more efficient storage, prioritization of preservation needs, and better informed collection management. Moving image collection assessment can be daunting, and there is no “cookie cutter” model. This panel discussion with explore three different institutional approaches to collection assessment: The Museum of Modern Art, NBCUniversal, and the Yale Film Study Center. Each institution will discuss the specific needs of their collections, how they approached collection assessment, what methods were used, the challenges they faced, and what they learned in the process.
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Monitoring Digital Preservation Maturity With the NDSA Levels of Preservation
Karen Cariani, WGBH
Linda Tadic, Digital Bedrock
Establishing digital preservation workflows or performing a gap analysis of your current practices can sometimes feel like an overwhelming task. The National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) Levels of Preservation grid, recently updated, was developed to guide organizations as they think through their current and planned digital preservation workflows and policies. This session will discuss what the tool is, how it can be helpful, how it can be used, and request feedback from the community on the current revision. The session will be an open discussion about best practice for digital preservation, and specifically for moving image collections. Other potential groups that share similar information, such as PASIG will also be introduced. Karen Cariani and Linda Tadic, NDSA Coordinating Committee members, will present the new revision and lead discussions to gather feedback. Linda Tadic will discuss how she has used the grid in trainings and teaching about digital preservation.
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DV Rescue! Lessons Learned and Outcomes from Battling DV Obsolescence
Libby Savage Hopfauf, Moving Image Preservation of Puget Sound/Seattle Municipal Archives
Dave Rice,CUNY
DV videotape formats face an exceptional obsolescence risk. Falling in-between professional expertise in file-based digital preservation and analog videotape digitization, DV tape are best preserved by migrating the data from the tape into a file rather than handling them as a video digitization event. This panel will review the work of a project responsive to the status of DV, called DV Rescue. The DV Rescue project is funded by the NEH in order to research DV preservation and to create new tools to facilitate the efficient transfer of data from tape to file. The presenters will show early models of their work, research conclusions, and methods to troubleshoot DV capture and preservation.
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Physical conservation treatments for digitizing film: re-plasticization
Greg Wilsbacher, Univ. of South Carolina
Tommy Aschenbach, Colorlab, Inc.
Reto Kromer, AV Preservation by reto.ch
Diana Little, The MediaPreserve
How do you preserve a film that has become warped, brittle or hockey pucked? This panel brings leading experts in photochemical and digital film preservation together to discuss a common and controversial physical conservation technique used when preparing film for preservation scanning or printing; re-plasticization. Tommy Aschenbach, Reto Kromer and Diana Little will discuss the history of this technique, the ethics surrounding its use and their individual experiences in order to improve the depth of knowledge available to the field on this form of treatment.
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Building Sustainability into Queer Archival Initiatives
Claire Fox, New York University
Kendell Harbin, Roaming Center for Magnetic Alternatives
Louisa Trott, University of Tennessee
Alexandra Juhasz, Brooklyn College
What does queer history look like? What does it sound like? How does it feel? Browsing through an LGBTQ+ media archive might help you find an answer. But how do you find one? Is there one in your town? Can you find materials online? And if you can, how do you know it still exists? This panel brings together three speakers from different queer media preservation initiatives: Kendell Harbin, who runs the Roaming Center for Media Alternatives in libraries across the Midwest; Louisa Trott, who works on the Voices Out Loud Project to preserve East Tennessee’s LGBTQ+ history and culture; and Alexandra Juhasz, who initiated the VHS Archives Working Group at CUNY to consider the connection between migrating tape formats and caring for the people who created them. Together, panelists will think through how a sustainable, accessible queer archive might look, based on their experiences doing the work.
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Lies (!) told by film distributors in 1915
Rachel Del Gaudio, Library of Congress
Robert J. Kiss,
New York-based distributor Kriterion Service and its successor Associated Service offered theaters a weekly program of ‘all-American’ films from independent manufacturers around the nation. Promising a release schedule that was ‘regular as clockwork’ and ‘dependable as a train timetable,’ the company put out a staggering 291 movies between January 8, 1915 and January 3, 1916. However, the hyper-organized veneer was held in place only by a clandestine scheme of ‘creative rebranding,’ with San Mateo productions passed off as the work of Edendale filmmakers, New York comedies and Colorado westerns served up as creations of Santa Barbara Film Manufacturing Co., and so forth. In short: everything we think we know about the 291 releases of the Kriterion and Associated Services is wrong. Employing a wealth of rare illustrative material, the mountain of untruths will be dismantled, demonstrating the considerable impact this has on accepted histories of local filmmaking in the U.S.
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What Do We Owe Each Other: Film and Social Infrastructure
Elena Rossi-Snook, The New York Public Library
Alexander Whelan
In addition to reporting on the latest AMIA Film Advocacy Task Force We Save 2 Film workshop, held in October 2019 for New York City middle school students, this presentation will address and create an open dialogue to consider how we as archivists and librarians can become more effective as professionals by engaging more meaningfully with the communities we hope to serve. In considering “archiving” as an act of saving material, the Film Advocacy Task Force can’t help but wonder: should we be adding consistent, face-to-face engagement with the public as the final step in our workflow? Can the objective of preserving our moving image materials be the fostering of a more literate, critical-thinking and civic minded society? Presenters will discuss how this workshop can be scaled for any institution and made a sustainable means of meeting outreach objectives.
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When A State Makes A Film: Politics, Policy, and History
Martin Johnson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Angélica Gasparotto de Oliveira, Unibo – University of Bologna
Lauren Pilcher, Georgia College
Devin Orgeron, North Carolina State University
Audrey Amidon, National Archives and Records Administration
Governments have long utilized motion pictures to inform, persuade, and document the people and resources under their control. But, state-made films are more than just a visual reenactment of state power. In his panel, we will present work that demonstrates the diversity of state-produced films as well as tools for analysis, presentation, and publicity on these underseen and unexamined films and videos. This hybrid panel will present two case studies of government-produce films, as well as presentations on how government films can be taught in the classroom, and the challenges inherent in locating and identifying government film.
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Open Sourcing Online Video Distribution Technologies
Pamela Vízner Oyarce, AVP
Candice Cranmer, ACMI
Erwin Verbruggen, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision
Johan Oomen, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision
The moving images and sounds our organizations assess, assemble and carefully preserve exist with the goal of finding an audience. In this panel we highlight innovative and open approaches to present audiovisual collections online. How do you publish your collections online using open source tools? How do you push collection content to the smart device that almost every visitor has in their pocket? How do you provide an open source, uniform playout experience for cross-collection access? How do you attract different audiences to the long tail of your collections? This panel will address these questions showcasing the AVP & Fortunoff Collections jointly developed Aviary, the ACMI’s Museum OS for moving images, the EUscreen-supported IIIF-based Europeana Media player and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision’s research project ReTV into automating video summarization.
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Surviving the Game: Fear, Labor & Community on the Information/Archives Battlefield
Ariel Schudson, Archivist’s Alley
Rachel E Beattie, University of Toronto
Amy Heller-Doros, Milestone Films
One of the most commonly used phrases in the archives and information profession is “I would be afraid to do/say that- I might lose my job!” The poisonous silences linked with labor and structural oppression are a dominating aspect of the archives/information landscape for young professionals. Affecting our mental/physical/emotional health, issues borne from fear and poor labor practices are currently causing many of its most talented members (or possible members) to find work elsewhere. Making the decision to start talking about uncomfortable topics is the only way that we can change them. Through the use of anonymous written and audio documents and in-person discourse, we will work through crucial topics like fear, labor, hiring practices, the kyriarchy and self-care, ruminating on what we can do as a community to support and care for each other as well as the work we do in this precarious time.
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Known Issues or Non Issues With AV Preservation Equipment
Morgan Oscar Morel, Bay Area Video Coalition
Blanche Joslin, New York University
Libby Hopfauf, Moving Image Preservation of Puget Sound (MIPoPS)
Dave Rice, CUNY TV
The purpose of this panel is to discuss known issues with gear that is popular or common in our community. Modern analysis tools like QCTools have made possible to identifier problems with legacy equipment that were difficult or impossible to see before. Technicians and digitization specialists from NYU, MIPoPS, CUNY TV and BAVC will openly discuss errors and issues that they’ve encountered with equipment in their digitization workflows, focusing on the workarounds and solutions they use to mitigate these problems.
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Rediscovering U.S. Newsfilm: Advocacy, Access & Agendas
Mark Quigley, UCLA Film & Television Archive
Mark Garrett Cooper, University of South Carolina
Dan Streible, NYU
Ruta M Abolins, UGA/Peabody Archive
Becca Bender, Rhode Island Historical Society
Lightening talks by archivists and academics will advocate for expanded initiatives to preserves and provide access to newsfilm, newsreeels, and newsmedia. Each speaker will screen a few minutes of newsfilm/video from archival collection(s) and then each give a short talk based on that footage, pointing towards the themes of increased advocacy for and access to these newsfilm collections across disciplines, and generating new opportunities to build momentum for collaborative efforts. The theme of the session is to create synergy and strategies among mutually-interested groups, such as academics from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and archivists in AMIA to promote the expanded preservation and use of newsreels, newsfilm and newsmedia.
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Strategies for Preservation Advocacy Within Your Organization
Alison Reppert Gerber, Smithsonian Institution Archives
Kira Sobers, Smithsonian Institution Archives
For many archives who care for mixed media collections, audiovisual preservation can be a struggle. These collections provide a unique challenge for organizations due to the sheer complexity of preservation – overall content management, physical stabilization, and digitization. A comprehensive plan for staffing, equipment set-up and maintenance, continued training, collection prioritization, and digital preservation infrastructure requires institutional support and funding. But how do you best raise awareness and garner support for your audiovisual collections? The answer – data gathering! Since 2015, the Smithsonian Institution has undertaken two large projects to gather data, using widely available tools and understandable methodologies, in order to support future audiovisual preservation initiatives. The 2016-2017 survey served as an inventory to gather group-level information on formats, condition, and storage environments. The 2018-2019 Audiovisual Preservation Readiness Assessment (AVPRA), performed by AMIA’s Community Archiving Collective, gathered information about current preservation rates, risk of collection loss, and institutional capability to care for these at-risk collections.
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Storage at Low Temperature: Why Is It Important and How to Implement It
Jean-Louis Bigourdan, Image Permanence Institute/RIT
Research on the stability of film materials has demonstrated that the most important factor to maximize the useful life of film collections is the control of environmental conditions. Cold and dry conditions result in a longer life span. Archivists face a variety of issues depending on their resources, the size and state of preservation of their collections. Regarding the implementation of low temperature storage, choosing the best-fit option can be a daunting task given the multiple factors to consider. The objective of this presentation is to provide a comprehensive synthesis of the research, and to discuss the intricate decision-making process of implementing low temperature storage. Understanding the behavior of film as it experiences temperature and RH transitions, and the impact of low storage temperature alternatives will be addressed. A step-by-step approach will provide directions to select, implement, and monitor the most suitable low temperature storage option in a given situation.
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Local TV News Archives: A Portal to Buffalo History
Laura Treat, Texas Archive of the Moving Image
Rich Newberg, Buffalo Broadcasters Association (BBA)
Heidi Ziemer, Western New York Library Resources Council (WNYLRC)
Meg Cheman, Buffalo and Erie County Public Library
Allison Lund, Buffalo and Erie County Public Library
Local television news archives contain infinite possibilities for public and community engagement with regional history. However, numerous challenges exist for news archives custodians to preserve and promote their collections. In this case study, representatives of the Buffalo Broadcasters Association, Western New York Library Resources Council, and Buffalo & Erie County Public Library discuss how they are increasing access to the news archive of local affiliate WIVB-TV (CBS) and the value of relationship building in this work. Discussion will emphasize gaining station support, developing workflows for online access, and working with educators and community members to make the archives part of a larger effort to raise awareness of New York State history. Drawing on their successful experience of initiating multiple access points to local history through television news, panelists offer insight and incentive for attendees of all experience levels looking for these kinds of opportunities in their own regions.
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Close It Out: Task Management Platforms in AV Archives
Brendan Coates, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Dinah Handel, Stanford
Morgan Morel, Bay Area Video Coalition
Workflow development, documentation, and project management are important skills in librarianship; as the possibilities of instantiating our workflows in code grow more numerous and accessible, what does it mean for the archival AV community to integrate workflow automation and task management software in our work-lives? Drawing on a range of titles, work experiences, and organizational settings, this panel will focus on the use of task management software in an archival AV context, with a particular focus on commonly used platforms such as Jira/ Trello, Salesforce, and Aeon. Panelists will describe their own use of these tools with a critical eye towards how they are, in turn, changing the nature of our work. Audience members will learn about the practical and philosophical foundations of working with these systems from a project management perspective with a focus on creating better working relationships between colleagues and improved services for users.
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“It’s b sales bills”: Captioning Problems from the Video Bog
Chloe A McLaren, Cornell University Library
Desi Alexander, Cornell University Library
A joint report from Desi Alexander (AV Collections Coordinator) and Chloe McLaren (Metadata Projects Librarian) from Cornell University Library about how we are developing an AV captioning workflow, and the missteps we’ve taken along the way. Cornell has determined that all newly online, publicly available AV material should be captioned from Jan 1, 2020 onward. This has special implications for the library, since much of the “newly online” material is in fact recently digitized archival material, often indifferently recorded. As a small digitization shop within a large university library, we are attempting to simultaneously incorporate new tools and workflows to adequately caption, while not dissolving into sad puddles of goo under our respective desks.
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Digital Transformation of Film Archives: 10 steps to become Digital by Design
Jan Muller, National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA)
The NFSA has embraced digital – building collections and enabling access to them for use and re-use and integrating digital experiences in our events and exhibitions. Digital Transformation at the NFSA is not so much about transformation from analogue to digital; rather, it is about evolution from a first generation, hybrid analogue/digital film archive to an archive that is digital by design. ‘Analogue’ and ‘digital’ are not mutually exclusive or opposing forces. The NFSA’s physical collections, the onsite and online exhibitions, programs, events and even the building are an integral part of the digitalisation of the NFSA. An archive that is ‘digital by design’ means that our intention is to think, act and be digital first – for digital experiences to be intrinsically part of the life of the archive and the people who learn, experience and create with us. In this interactive presentation, the principles of becoming an archive that is digital by design and the steps that the NFSA will take in order to make Digital Transformation happen are highlighted. Attention in this presentation also for the serious focus on People and Culture and the structure of the organisation.
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Tales of Futures Past: Lessons Learned from the File Format Wars
James Snyder, Library of Congress
Media preservation involves files every day. Files that original content producers created. Files we must make to allow preservation and access to both digitized physical media and content that started life as digital. Participants will learn about how files and essence coding systems were originally created, the file format wars that mimicked the incompatible physical media formats, and how certain file types prevailed.
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H for Horrific: The Horror Movie Drought of 1936-1938
Charlotte Barker (Johnson), Paramount Pictures Archives
Kathryn Claypool, Paramount Pictures Archive
While working on the preservation of the Bela Lugosi film The Human Monster (aka Dark Eyes of London), we stumbled upon a rating that was previously unknown to us; the BBFC’s “H for Horrific” card. During our investigation into the significance of this card, we were shocked to find that there had been a temporary stop in horror film production in the late 1930s in both the US and UK. Even more alarming was that most theories maintained that the H for Horrific card, along with the Hays Code, were directly to blame for it. Through further research, into this Horror movie hiatus, we determined that there were a myriad of factors that brought about the cessation of production of horror feature films during the years 1936-38. In this presentation, we intend to examine the cultural, technological, administrative and international pressures that caused studios to steer clear of the material.
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Counter-Archives and Counter-Pedagogy: Building Outreach through Education in Film Preservation
Paul S Moore, Ryerson University
Marta Braun, Ryerson University
Leonardo Gomes, Ryerson University
Shannon Gagnon, Ryerson University
Rajneet Sahota, Ryerson University
Harnoor Bhangu, Ryerson University
Film and video “counter-archives” disrupt conventional national narratives to write difference into public accounts. Resistant and community-based, these archives counter the hegemony of traditional archival institutions that have normally neglected or marginalized women, Indigenous Peoples, the LGBT2Q+ community, and immigrant communities. But film preservation for counter-archives requires a “counter-pedagogy,” where training is paired with student-centred research and professional development. Student archival internships are a significant part of Archives | Counter-Archives, a national-scale multi-year project across Canada. The Master’s in Film Preservation and Collections Management at Ryerson University is a special hub of activity in this component of the project. To ask what role AV heritage should take is to examine the relation of AV archives to networks of power in society. Altogether, our film preservation students are central to outreach, and their on-site training stands as a counter-pedagogy to connect and mobilize smaller archival organizations, researchers, and policy-makers interested in determining the special needs of audiovisual preservation across different communities and contexts.
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Would You Like To Save Your Game?: A Case Study
David Gibson, Library of Congress
Amanda May, Library of Congress
Laura Drake Davis, Library of Congress
Libraries, archives and museums are facing an ever increasing amount of interactive media in their collections, including software applications, time based artworks and video games. These materials provide unique challenges in regards to acquisition, description and preservation, and many institutions are working to develop new approaches to ensuring the long term preservation of and access to born digital cultural artifacts. This panel will present a case study from the Library of Congress on the development of a workflow for the cataloging, preservation and ingest of video game content into the Library’s digital repository. Digital Project Specialists Laura Drake Davis and Amanda May and Library Technician David Gibson will present different aspects of the workflow, highlighting the holistic approach that is required to ensure that this content is retained for future generations. This presentation will appeal to archivists working on their own solutions to the challenges of preserving born digital content.
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Artifacts of Production: Managing Film Outtakes
Genevieve Havemeyer-King, New York Public Library
Megan McShea, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Amy Sloper, Harvard Film Archive
Large film collections contain more production elements than their archivists are willing to admit. We lament about our struggles to manage these materials in a responsible and meaningful way under dire budgetary circumstances and often without buy-in from stakeholders, while knowing that they no doubt contains unseen gems, alternate endings, or glorious candid footage. A labor of love, production outtakes, trims, cuts, edited elements – whatever one calls them – demand preservation but pose some of the greatest challenges to appraisal, selection, organization, conservation, and digitization. Through guided discussion with attendees of this session, we hope to kickstart a larger effort to compile terminology, methodologies, tips, and best practices from the archival community into a public guide that will benefit preservationists and content-makers alike.
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Supporting Digital Scholarship: Enabling Analysis of AV Collections at Scale
Casey Davis Kaufman, WGBH
Clifford Anderson, Vanderbilt University
Stephanie Sapienza, University of Maryland
Jaime Mears, Library of Congress
In this session, representatives from the Vanderbilt Television News Archive (VTNA), University of Maryland’s Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), the Library of Congress LABS Division, and WGBH and the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, will provide an overview of the digital humanities; they will share policies developed that support use of their institutions’ collections in digital humanities research; they will demonstrate how these collections have been exposed in ways that enable computational analysis and reuse in digital humanities initiatives; and will they present case study examples of how they’ve enabled discovery of archival collections through digital scholarship.
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Case Study: Earth Science Communications Content Registry at NASA
Meghan Fitzgerald, SSAI @ NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
This case study will walk through the planning and implementation of a project to create a registry of web content for NASA’s Earth Sciences Division, called ESCCOR: Earth Science Communications Content Registry. The presentation will include information about data models, schemas, and controlled vocabularies used to create the ESCCOR ontology; selection and implementation of software using APIs and linked data; hurdles and how we overcame them; and a live demonstration. ESCCOR catalogs, indexes, and registers public-facing web content created by various communications-focused departments. This case study is an example of how to apply archival and library science principles, standards, and processes to ephemeral content produced by NASA groups creating educational Earth Science audiovisual content for daily public web consumption. The speaker is the project manager, cataloger, and taxonomist for ESCCOR. She will share what she’s learned so that others working on similar projects can benefit from those learnings.
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Engaging students and instructors with local television news collections
Mary Lynn Miller, Brown Media Archives, University of Georgia
Laurel Schafer, University of Georgia
Jason Woodworth, University of Georgia
Archives holding local news collections may struggle to find institutional support for the care these collections require. One way to gain support is by demonstrating that they are being used for research and instruction. This interactive presentation uses examples from the University of Georgia to illustrate approaches to connecting with scholars and facilitating student use of local news collections. The presentation will include pre-recorded presentations by students who have used the collections and helpful information about how to work with donor stations, instructors, and students to enable successful research and scholarly creation using these materials.
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Digital Asset Management in 2019: Trends in Stills Archiving (AI)
Dony West, Paramount Pictures
Caitlin Denny, Paramount Pictures
Rebecca Ruud, Paramount Pictures
Digital asset management in 2019: What can be learned from current trends in Stills archiving (AI, automated ingest) Our first topic would discuss the pro’s and con’s of incorporating “computer learning” applications into our current preservation workflows for out stills collection at Paramount. A general overview of our current preservation methods, and newly integrated AI within our DAM. Production photography from lost silent stills. Our Sr Archivist in photochemical will discuss our collection of rare, silent stills within our collection. Discussing our search & discovery process, as well as preservation and digitization of this amazing photography. How a still illustrates a motion picture archive – Designs for home media, Costume exhibition, Internal Marketing, Licensing, Franchise Support, and Reference. Stills are often overlooked as a pivotal part of the film making process. We will discuss a bit of the historical and contemporary trends and use cases for these important assets, and how they are used in support beyond the marketing of a film.
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Screening Medicine: Imaging and recording the body with time-based media
Timothy Wisniewski, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives, Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions
Angela Saward, Wellcome Collection
Sarah Eilers, Historical Audiovisuals, History of Medicine Division, Naltional Library of Medicine
Why was film considered to be such a powerful medium for the medical professions? This screening and panel discussion looks at the influence of the moving image and sound on the medical profession and vice versa throughout the twentieth century. Many doctors and medical professionals have appreciated the power of the image and used it to augment their research; on occasions they have even turned the cameras on themselves, becoming competent amateur filmmakers in their own right. Looking at two research settings, the laboratory and the clinic (from microscopy to cineradiography), it’s possible to look at the commonalities in medical films and video material held in the archives of three important medical research institutions – the Alan Mason Chesney Archives at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutes, Historical Audiovisuals at the History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, and Wellcome Collection and consider how this material has contributed to the understanding of ourselves.
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The Spider and the Fly: A Talking Case Study
Kyle Westphal, Chicago Film Society
Kate Dollenmayer, Academy Film Archive/Center for Home Movies
Andy Tamburrino (unconfirmed), Colorlab
The first 16mm projectors with optical sound playback arrived on the market in 1932, but home movie makers with talkie ambitions would have to wait until 1935 for the RCA Sound Camera, the first 16mm camera that recorded picture and sound simultaneously. Few amateur films with sound from this era remain extant. One recently discovered example, “The Spider and the Fly” (1938), is a charming artifact that demonstrates the expressive possibilities and technical limitations of amateur talkies. A single reel plucked from a larger collection with only a suggestively incomplete hand-written note in the can for context, the “Spider and the Fly” project grew out of a screening at a 2016 edition of Home Movie Day. This panel will include a screening of a new 16mm print of “The Spider and the Fly” and a discussion of the scholarly and technical research that supported its preservation.
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Preserving a University’s Videotape Archive on a DIY Budget
Hugo Ljungbäck, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
For the past two years, I have been charged with reviewing and digitizing 1” Type C reels, 3/4” U-matic cassettes, and VHS tapes from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s recently-defunct television studio. These videos offer a portrait of the university’s pedagogical and intellectual history, and one of the videotapes recovered is a 1975 Theatre X production, Civil Commitment Hearings, which includes a young Willem Dafoe, then a UWM theatre student. This 1975 production is exemplary of the radical, experimental, and political plays Theatre X staged throughout the company’s time, and in my presentation, I aim to consider the intersection of its radical politics, production context, and preservation, while discussing the challenges of preserving “obsolete” media in an institutional context on a DIY budget. Using Civil Commitment Hearings as a case study, I hope to tease out some of the complexities, challenges, and questions raised by working within a university videotape archive.
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Tribesourcing Midcentury Educational Films: Digital Repatriation and Local Knowledge
Jennifer Jenkins, University of Arizona
Melissa Dollman, University of North Carolina
Rhiannon Sorrell, Diné College
In this NEH-funded digital humanities project, we take midcentury educational films back into Indian Country where they were made in the 1940s through 60s and record new narrations by community members and elders from the insider point of view. This “”tribesourcing”” method allows for identification of local knowledge that might otherwise be lost, as well as providing a rich, community-based metadata record for each film. We will demonstrate the merging of old video and new audio in Mukurtu, and discuss what we have learned in the process of digitally repatriating these midcentury films. We’ll show examples of “”before”” and “”after,” and discuss the collaborative process with tribal partners.
Workshops
Audiovisual & Preservation Technology Basics for Non-Engineers (Full Day)
James Snyder, Library of Congress
This workshop will focus on providing a good technical basis, in plain English, for those who do not already have audiovisual engineering or technical training. It builds on the 2014 half-day seminar, and expands to a full day in response to attendee feedback. It will allow non-technical people of all types to have a good, basic grasp of the technologies, concepts and terms involved in audiovisual recording and reproduction in general, digitization of audiovisual materials, and file-based workflows, metadata and long-term data archiving. Workshop attendees will walk away with a good, operating grasp of the technologies involved, de-mystifying the terms and concepts audiovisual archivists face every day at institutions large and small so they know what materials they are looking at, how to handle their preservation, and how to plan for their digital conversion. They will have a functional knowledge of the terms and concepts required to write grants and contracts for digital conversion and storage of audiovisual materials.
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Cataloging the Moving Image: Data Modeling, FRBR, BIBFRAME, and PBCore (Full Day)
Randal Luckow, HBO
Andrea Leigh, Library of Congress
Meghan Fitzgerald, NASA
Rebecca Fraimow, WGBH Boston
This highly-interactive workshop will provide participants with real-world strategies to evaluate and implement data models, descriptive standards, controlled vocabularies, and shared data authorities, through practical hands-on exercises. Dynamic presentations will illustrate the role and purpose of putting in place a strong data model for bibliographic description, using BIBFRAME and FRBR examples, and the value of implementing standards such as LCSH, LCGFT, and AAT as data authorities. Participants will put these cataloging and metadata concepts directly into practice utilizing tools emerging from the NEH-funded PBCore Development and Training Project. A special hands-on session will apply genre/form headings to moving images, and show how they are used symbiotically with Library of Congress Subject Headings to describe both what a work is and what it is about. Participants will complete simple and complex inventory projects using PBCore Inventory Templates; generate detailed PBCore catalog records using the PBCore Cataloging Tool; compare/contrast inventory records, catalog records, and XML records; and validate PBCore XML records using the PBCore XML Validator. Participants will also practice cross walking between different standards. Presenters include well-respected experts in the field who take care to design sessions that are highly engaging and reflect the most current developments in audiovisual archiving. This workshop is sponsored by the Cataloging and Metadata Committee in collaboration with the PBCore advisory subcommittee. This workshop is intended for those with a moderate level of understanding of metadata standards and implementation strategies.
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Doing Oral History (Full Day)
Teague Schneiter, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences
Anne Kelly, USC Shoah Foundation
Jenni Matz, Television Academy
Brendan Coates, Academy of Motion Pictures
“Doing Oral History” will provide training in each of the core areas of this important documentation method. Attendees will learn how to record, archive and provide access to a single interview, and even how to start their own oral history program. Workshop leaders will teach the following one hour sessions: 1) What is Oral History?/Project Design (handout to create design), 2) Legal and Ethical Framework, 3) Recording Technology (Equipment, lighting, set up), 4) Interviewing Techniques, 5) Lunch break, 6) Records Management & Cataloging, 7) Transcription & Other Derivative Works, 8) Access and Outcomes, 9) Afternoon Section Overflow & Q&A. The workshop will be interactive and include sample materials, assignments, workshopping, a practice interview (with feedback from professionals), and training how to index oral histories using OHMS. This session is also targeted training for professionals looking to learn more about how to ethically work with oral history materials.
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Airtable for A/V Archivists (Half Day)
Stephanie Sapienza, University of Maryland
Ed Summers, University of Maryland
Airtable is an online relational database application that operates somewhere between Excel/Google Spreadsheets, FileMaker, and OpenRefine. With a high ease of usability and very low barrier of entry, Airtable is ideal for archivists without resources or skill sets to implement more technologically complex solutions for metadata management. It’s an ideal solution for low-budget cultural heritage organizations and regional archives operating with a disbursed labor force. This workshop will start by discussing different metadata starting point scenarios users may be working from. Then we will utilize a pre-existing data set of item-level records, and work as a group to: – Create controlled vocabularies/authority lists; – De-duplicate and normalize records; – Concatenate repeating fields into one column with multiple values; – Create custom views of subsets of your metadata; After the group exercises, we will provide an overview of some more advanced uses of Airtable, including using Airtable Blocks, and the Airtable API.
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Packing and Shipping Nitrate Film Certification (Half Day)
Robert Smith, CARGOpak
Fulfill your nitrate film packing and shipping training requirement while at this years AMIA conference! Nitrate film is classified as a hazardous material and the regulations of packing and shipping it are very strict. This half day workshop will provide attendees with all the relevant regulatory information to be able to pack and ship nitrate film. Here is a chance to train new employees or to renew your existing DG/hazmat training without incurring the cost of a personal training session or webinar. The class is exclusively about Nitrocellulose film shipping, only UN1324 in a half day workshop.
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Python for AV File Management (Half Day)
Benjamin Turkus, New York Public Library
Nick Krabbenhoeft, New York Public Library
Python is often referred to as the “swiss army knife” of computer programming languages, capable of meeting the needs of nearly any task with its characteristic ease-of-use, simplicity, and efficiency. In this half-day workshop, Nick Krabbenhoeft and Ben Turkus, two members of NYPL’s Research Libraries, will go full Leatherman, introducing participants to all the various ways that Python can have a transformative effect on media digitization workflows. Designed for archivists working with digital/digitized media collections of any size, this will be a practical and skills-oriented effort, offering participants a thorough grounding in Python basics, and an introduction to a number of Python tools that allow for the general manipulation and analysis of media. Specific modules/libraries/tools will include: the os, glob, re, subprocess, shutil, csv and json modules; FFmpeg; pymediainfo/MediaConch; pandas; matplotlib; and seaborn.
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Remix, Reuse, Recycle: Baltimore Regional Audiovisual Archives and You! (Half Day)
Laura Treat, Texas Archive of the Moving Image
Siobhan Hagan, Mid-Atlantic Regional Moving Image Archive (MARMIA), DC Public Library
Join archivists, educators, and artists to learn how you can remix, re-use, and recycle regional archival AV in your own work. Through a series of interactive screenings, activities, and lightning talks hosted by practitioners and experienced archives users, you will learn more about the variety of archival media available for use, how to better navigate moving image archives, and how to incorporate these materials in areas including media production, education, genealogy, and local historical preservation. Archivists and experienced archives users will be available for individual and group consultations relevant to your specific interests and projects. Participants of all backgrounds and levels of experience are encouraged to join us in a welcoming and inclusive space for collaboration and learning.
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A partnership between AMIA and the Digital Library Federation, Hack Day is a unique opportunity for practitioners and managers of audiovisual collections to join with developers and engineers for an intense day of collaboration to develop solutions for audiovisual preservation and access. Within digital preservation and curation communities, hack days provide an opportunity for archivists, collection managers, technologists, and others to work together develop software solutions, documentation or training materials, and more for collections management needs.