AVPS At Createasphere Digital Asset Management Conference

The AVPS team is excited to be participating in the 2012 Createasphere Digital Asset Management Conference in New York City as both a presenter and an exhibitor. Createasphere provides training, conferences, networking, and other resources regarding the use of technology in the creation and management of media assets. Their regional DAM conferences present real world use cases from end users and experts in the field to discuss the challenges and solutions to managing digital collections.

On the presentation side, Senior Consultant Kara Van Malssen will be chairing the panel What Do You Mean I Need Digital Preservation? I’ve got DAM with presenters Sally Hubbard of HBO and Karen Cariani of WGBH. The panel will discuss the areas where DAMS fulfill the needs of digital preservation and where the systems require supplemental tools and strategies, with input from how these issues are being approached by two of the country’s largest broadcast entities.

You can also catch Kara and the rest of the AVPS team at booth 308 in the Exhibitor Hall. Come chat about your media preservation and collection management needs and pick up some of our popular archiving themed buttons. Createasphere takes place this Thursday and Friday, September 27-28 at the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan. See you there!

Using Open Source And Free Tools For AV Digital Preservation Workflows

Archiving and preservation consist of technology, people, and policies. For technology in particular, digital AV archives are largely indebted and beholden to a few sizable industries: cinema, broadcast, and information technology.

Commercial interests catering to the aforementioned industries have produced a seemingly attractive tool set that has the potential to provide archives with the ability to apply their policies in service of preservation-oriented workflows. Yet, even in the hands of larger well-resourced organizations, employing these tools can be challenging and resource intensive. How can smaller, resource-constrained AV archives efficiently apply cost effective tools and technologies to their workflows?

This article by Kara Van Malssen was originally published in AV Insider, Issue 2, September 2012.

• TOOLS FOR SMALLER BUDGETS (PDF)

Preservation Is Not A Format

An aphoristic interpretation in 10 parts

1. Authorial intent is, for all practical purposes, bunk. It presupposes, fallaciously, either the existence of the singular creator, or the total achievability of an artistic vision.

The former is false because it is a figment of the artist’s imagination. The latter, because it is a figment of the consumer’s imagination.

 

***********

 
2. The desired qualities of a format and the availability of a format do not necessarily converge. The adoption of a format for creative uses may be a matter of convenience rather than vision and integrity.

 

***********

 
3. Despite the philosophical crutch that Benjamin represents, the problem of reproducable media did not begin with photography. The printing press blew apart the conceptual framework and reliance on hand-copied manuscripts. This resulted in massive increases in literacy, the Protestant Reformation, and American democracy.

Agitation prompted by reproducable media of the 20th century has resulted in The People vs. George Lucas and discussion forum debates over the presentation of Friends in HD.

 

***********

 
4. A primary pleasure of the cinema experience — sitting in the dark, the engulfing screen — is that it distracts from the worn, frequently unhygienic setting. The odors are another matter.

Multiplexes compound these issues.

 

***********

 
5.

***********

 
6. “As it was meant to be seen” is a remnant of the VHS homevideo age, referring merely to the use of the correct aspect ratio, not to format or presentation method. Extrapolation to other aspects of media consumption in an age of non-homogenous platforms is limited at best, tedious at worst.

 

***********

 
7. Suggested Library of Congress Subject Heading: Defining parameters of technological purity, Randomness of

 

***********

 
8. Planned obsolescence is used as a pejorative when conducted by corporations, as a sign of artistic purity when utilized by creators. Both inhibit future access.

 

***********

 
9. Aesthetic valuation is a result of temporal, cultural, and personal interpretation, both at the moment of creation and the moment of consumption. These interpretive moments impact continued future interpretation factatorily.

 

***********

 
10. Were we not culturally tied to a base 10 system, 10 aphorisms would still be an arbitrary selection.

 

***********

 
— Joshua Ranger

The Present Analog Dark Age

The great thing about predicting doom and gloom is that the end times are always imminent, but never quite here. The natural state of a threat is to loom. If it actually ever happens — hey, you’re prescient! If not, well, there’s still the possibility…

The death of film has been a productive area for prognosticators on both sides of the fence, those lamenting its passing as a Caligulan descent into a cultural morass and those cheering its decease as an evolutionary improvement on par with a whole planetary society of apes, damned and/or dirty though they may be.

Kodak’s recent foray into a market previously deemed too small to be feasible notwithstanding, the death of film has — denying both sides of another fence on the property — been neither greatly exaggerated nor correctly reported. Though we are all legally compelled to consider corporations as people, the death of a non-human entity is not a singular temporal or irreversible event.

Another profitable area where people are encroaching on Nostradamus’ turf is the gnashing of teeth and tolling of bells declaring the coming digital dark age, the period when all digital content will be lost and, because all analog content will have been trashed after it is digitized and posted on the Facebook, all human knowledge will disappear or be locked up in the secular, Internets version of monasteries (i.e., third-party owned server farms) — well, there or, once again, saved in the mouths of the Irish, gar bless ’em — as occurred in the original Dark Ages.

Later arguments aside, are we really in such an intellectual…dark age where we can’t even imagine new historical structures/events without them simply mirroring or borrowing from past epochs we read a paragraph about in Western Civ?

I will here bite my tongue (whilst still I bite my thumb) about an essential misrepresentation of the richness of the medieval period that the pejorative of the Dark Ages (and its Euro-centrism) has bequeathed upon the era, a timespan which itself, like the death of film, has no hard temporal definition.

Rather, I would say, or will say presently, we should set the idea of the coming digital dark ages aside for a moment. Set aside the fear of the future and understand that we are already in the midst of an analog media dark age right… … … now. Formats are obsolete. Archives and individuals do not know what content they have and in many cases do not have the means to access it. Much of our audiovisual heritage is at risk of being lost, but a large portion of that is already effectively lost because it is unfindable and/or inaccessible. Though an item is still physically sitting there on a shelf or in a box and has not burnt up in an Alexandrian fire, that does not mean the content is doing or is able to do its cultural/institutional work.

And really, this is the same state of digital media today as well. Countless files are essentially lost due to lack of findability and usability. The risk of loss is not inherent in the digital/analog divide but is a result of the exponential growth of content creation, material or structural factors of created objects, and the lack of broad resource support for the institutions tasked with preserving our cultural heritage. These factors, and the fear-mongering over the digital dark ages or the loss of even one single object, contribute to an atmosphere of inaction and indecision, one where the horror of future failure obscures the reality of the present and the pathways to managing that reality — pathways we as professionals have the skills to imagine, define, and follow.

— Joshua Ranger