More Podcast, Less Process Episode 6 Released
30 January 2014
AVPreserve announces the release of episode #6 of “More Podcast, Less Process”, the archives podcast co-produced with METRO. This week’s episode is “Can’t we all just get along? Shared services & institutional collaboration in libraries & archives” with guests Rachel Miller, Melanie Meyers, Lauren Bradley, and Felicity Corkill of the Center for Jewish History. The CJH consists of five partner organizations (American Jewish Historical Society, American Sephardi Federation, Leo Baeck Institute, Yeshiva University Museum and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research) that have banded together to share facilities and services in order support their common goal of providing research and educational resources related to more than 700 years of Jewish history. Our guests discuss the aspects of providing such shared services — the successes and challenges, as well as tips on collaboration. Though CJH presents a special situation of shared institutional goals, their efforts provide a model and guidance for many aspects of working across institutions, across departments, or even across the cubicle wall.
The Preservation Of The Singular Versus The Mass
23 January 2014
The (sorta) recent discovery and restoration of the film interstitials and outtakes for the stage play Too Much Johnson (I refuse to call a jumble of scenes tied to a larger narrative a film) shot by Orson Welles poses the obvious, titular question, how much Johnson is too much?
Enough With The Vinyl Already
17 January 2014
Unlike other dead media, the vinyl LP refuses to fade away, as the story of the vinyl revival assures us. Starting (at my first notice) in Slate and ping-ponging across the pond via Twitter (oh wait, or was that 2007?), the tale has ended up back stateside again on the editorial page of the New York Times. There the story was anew, this time paired with a similar short blurb comparing the use of ebooks and physical books (spoiler alert!: ebooks think they’re all that, but they’re not!).
Fixity V0.3 Released
16 January 2014
Version 0.3 of Fixity, the free fixity monitoring tool developed by AVPreserve, has been officially released for download on our Tools page and via GitHub. Fixity creates a manifest of files stored in directories identified by the user, documenting file names, locations, and checksums. The user can then schedule regular reviews of the directories to monitor for any changes to files that may point to data corruption or loss. Fixity is ideal for monitoring of files in long term storage, complimenting tools such as BagIt that check fixity at points of transition.
This release is a major update, addressing a number of issues related to scheduling, running the utility while a laptop is on battery power, compatibility with both 32-bit and 64-bit systems, and some user interface revisions. A Mac version should be released in the coming weeks. Download the new version of Fixity and keep giving us your feedback so we can continue to improve the tool.
Data Is A Simple Machine
10 January 2014
This post is a (I hope) friendly argument response to (or perhaps more a restatement of position regarding) Megan McShea’s response to a prior blog of mine posted on archivesnext.com regarding the use and effectiveness of EAD. I love what Megan wrote, but as the Al Chet prayer of Yom Kippur denotes, there are many sins of pride and stiff-neckedness that push one to respond in such situations.
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I had all four of my wisdom teeth extracted in one fell swoop when I was 19. My dentist assured me I could get through it without going under — just Novocain (and maybe a valium to calm the nerves). Dr. Payne — no joke — said he could just numb up my mouth, have at the offending teeth, and send me on my merry way without the need to recover from anesthesia. I was 19 and interested in saving money on the whole procedure, so I went along with his plan. I mean, really, why would Dr. Payne steer me wrong?
I reckon the whole thing wasn’t all that bad — he used a lot of Novocain — but I distinctly recall the odd sensation of mentally feeling teeth being pulled out of my head but not physically feeling it. Something to make me go “hmmm” while also needing to strongly hold back the urge to stop what was happening and/or gag.
I also recall the point at which I realized Dr. Payne was repurposing my forehead as a fulcrum, using the leverage of his arm against my skull to help work the teeth out. Yes, I thought, my head is a simple machine.
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This is still the case.
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Megan, I appreciate your thoughtful and extensive response to — or smackdown of — my blog post on EAD. If I had thought anyone would read and respond to my blogs I might’ve changed my mind about posting them! Really though, I think your point of view as a practitioner in an archive is valuable in opposition to mine as a consultant. The organizational and resource realities of archives are always foremost in my mind in my work as I try to find the point where the ideal, the possible, and the practical can meet and shake hands. I think the policies and processes the AAA has in place are at the high end of the curve on that graph, and it’s not easy to argue against your points because, well, you’re right.
But I still think you’re wrong.
I agree that, at the base of it, we’re talking across communities of practice. I deal with many broadcast or production centric collections, which produce a specific set of asset types and present use cases that may be less researcher focused than academic or research archives. A finding aid is fairly useless in this situation because it is not specific enough to identify and locate the correct item amidst what may be multiple versions, instantiations, and fragments — the same way one would need to be able to discern among manuscripts and various print editions (perhaps with major revisions or printing errors) of written material.
But I also think that all collections are now mixed collections (as all archivists are digital archivists) and it’s making less sense to make such distinctions. Also, many of those production-based collections eventually end up in traditional or institutional archives because it was produced internally by the organization or, at some point, the television station or documentarian or radio producer ends up donating their materials somewhere. That results in the ingest of boxes and boxes of (for example) camera originals, U-matic or Betacam film transfers, rough cuts, alternate audio mixes, masters, viewing copies on VHS or DVD, and perhaps some commercial distribution copies. As in the production environment, item level processing is really the only way to tell what’s what and find the right pieces to preserve or transfer for access.
Again, yes, a case that does not apply across the board if a collection is primarily published releases or one-off recordings, but with unique recordings I do see more frequently than not either materials that are not annotated well enough (if at all) to be able to identify them, or even the well-annotated materials that get stuck in the backlog and are never moved into the preservation queue because they are undescribed or unreckoned with.
And that really gets to the crux of my concern: whether dealing with a media-specific collection or mixed collection, audiovisual (and all digital) media needs to be made accessible either through reformatting or through the acquisition of proper playback equipment. Equally so, whether dealing with a media-specific collection or mixed collection, audiovisual (and all digital) media that is considered of lasting value needs to be preserved through reformatting or migration at some point in its lifecycle.
In dealing with magnetic media and certain other physical formats, the deadline for that reformatting is sooner than later. If you are not performing the activities that move those materials into a preservation queue and reformat them in the next 10-15 years, you are essentially discarding them. EAD does not achieve this level of need. In my view the reliance on EAD has resulted in it becoming an endpoint or cul de sac, not a pivot point — a situation much research is going into to try and dig out of in order to take advantage of how data is used today.
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Now I totally understand researcher driven preservation. When resources are limited, of course it makes sense to funnel them where it best supports the institutional mission. Though I know it happens I seldom see the individual items make it into MARC catalogs (notable exceptions, such as a number of research collections at NYPL). Description via EAD is of course considered a driver of that process by making collections more findable and promoting researcher request. I see a few problems here.
– Poorly annotated items can only be described at the collection name level with little clue as to actual content. Even if a minimal finding aid at the collection level is created, it will not necessarily give a clue to the contents. If we were looking for some rare Doris Wishman outtakes, without extra information would we necessarily know that the Mike Vraney Collection may contain them? Or that there may be home movie footage of a historical event mixed in with the primary type of content in such a collection if I do know the general scope?
– Just because someone is researching a topic does not make it of significant historical value. It may just be as equally an esoteric one-off or a wrong turn down a blind alley. That’s fine if materials are already accessible, but problematic if resources must first go to reformatting.
– Not all collections are research collections, and even in research collections the use cases for search and potential users may rely more on keywords, time-based metadata, transcripts, dates, etc.
– We simply don’t have that long to wait around.
Cumulatively these factors make the reactive position untenable. Of course we cannot (nor should not) preserve everything, but with the volume, time constraints, and severe findability/access issues with audiovisual and digital materials, we are at risk of slashing and burning much more than we need to or mean to.
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One of my regrets prior to and after posting about EAD was that the post didn’t quite express what was my original thought — not that EAD should be completely jettisoned, but that data collection should be granular and flexible. EAD has its place and its uses, but I often get the sense of a hyper focus on generating EAD that comes at the expense of collecting data in a way that would support finding aids as well as the other activities that support collection management. The dataset generated should be eminently deployable in its fundamental form. The information should be in a holding ground of sorts where an EAD finding aid, a MARC record, a viewer/media player, or some other online portal pulls the data it needs and maps it per its use in that form.
Despite the frothy mouthed proclamations over Big Data or the mystical gurus of data like Nate Silver and the Obama reelection campaign, data is a simple machine. It is nothing more than chunks of information (or more often, per the axiom, chunks of garbage) of varying length, moving in and out of systems. The complexities of data are merely a result of the Rube Goldbergian structure of schemas or relational tables — fragile systems of levers and pulleys performing various tasks — or a result of garbage-y, uncontrolled data.
If data is collected in a manner or form that privileges the endpoint (as opposed to a step or a goal stage), we risk getting stuck in that endpoint. I appreciate that EAD is an open standard and the XML structure allows portability, and the projects you list out are great examples of that use. But I also know a number of developers who hate working with it and have been stymied in creating automated upload/mapping utilities for EAD because the application of the standard is frequently idiosyncratic. Also, when dealing with audiovisual and digital media technical and process metadata is integral to collection management. Description is just one piece of supporting archival services.
In short, yes there are people mapping data out of EAD, but in my opinion we need to flip things and not just try to find solutions for porting out of EAD because that’s what we’re stuck in, but rather use EAD as something that is ported into as just one option for archival activities.
When MARC goes away, it’s going to be incredibly messy, both from the data migration standpoint and the resistance standpoint. And EAD will go away, too. First, because at some point you cannot keep revising a data structure to new media, new situations, and new technology without it eventually falling apart. At some point things need to be scrapped and begun anew. Second, because things go away. It is the nature of life and, therefore, of archives.
— Joshua Ranger
AVPreserve Welcomes Bertram Lyons
8 January 2014
AVPreserve is very pleased to welcome Bertram Lyons, the newest member of our growing team. Bert joins us from Library of Congress American Folklife Center where he helps develop tools, policies, and partnerships around the development and management of digital collections. During his tenure the AFC has become a leader in digital preservation at the Library of Congress, having built their collection to over 500,000 digital objects and integrated their analog and born digital acquisition and processing work flows into a seamless process. Bert will continue work with the AFC as he begins a consulting role with AVPreserve.
Prior to the Library of Congress Bert was Archivist and Collection Manager for the Alan Lomax Archive, one of the most significant collections of field recordings in 20th century history. A subject specialist in folklife collections, oral histories, and field and musical recordings, Bert has deep experience in all aspects of managing such collections, from the digitization of legacy materials, description, schema and database development, and accessioning/processing. He is active nationally and internationally with professional archival organizations such as the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (Member of the Executive Board and Editor of IASA publications) the Society of American Archivists (Chair of the Career Development Subcommittee and Vice-chair of the Oral History Section), the Association of Recorded Sound Collections, and the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA), and he has also received certification from the Academy of Certified Archivists and is a recent graduate of the Archives Leadership Institute.
We’re very excited to have Bert joining us and adding his expertise to what we can offer, and we are excited about the new collaborations and learning opportunities he will bring to our crew. AVPreserve has expanded a lot in the past year, and we look forward to continuing that growth and always improving our abilities in serving our community in the new year.
Quantifying The Need: A Survey Of Existing Sound Recordings In Collections In The United States
2 January 2014
In 2014, AVP and the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC), with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, undertook an in-depth, multi-faceted assessment to quantify the existing audio items held in institutional collections throughout the United States. This was performed in response to The Library of Congress National Recording Preservation Plan and its call for the appraisal of collections, as well as to establish a foundation for articulating the current preservation need of sound recordings in collections nationwide.
Our goal was to acquire enough trustworthy data to be able to answer questions such as “How many sound recordings exist in broadcast organizations across the US?” or “How many sound recordings exist in archives throughout the US?” Moreover, we wanted to answer more complex questions such as “How many of such items are preservation-worthy?” or “How many have already been digitized?” Prioritization for digitization is as critical as both funding and timeliness. The foundation for action on all three of these fronts is trustworthy quantitative data. This paper aims to provide such data along with supporting information about the methodologies used in its generation.
Smithsonian Digital Preservation Readiness Assessment
1 January 2014
In July 2009, Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne Clough spoke of the digital future of museums, libraries, and archives. “We have the capacity to tell the story of America and all its hopes, struggles, triumphs, creativity, contradictions, and courage.” “Ultimately, we want to put all of our … objects … online so you can access them wherever you live. We want to offer the Smithsonian experience to everyone,” said Clough to a group gathered at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
To ensure the longevity of these born-digital and digitized collections, research, and resources, in 2014 Secretary Clough chartered a Digital Preservation Working Group to assess current preservation practices and develop lifecycle management recommendations for the future.
