New Cloud Vendor Profile
24 June 2014
AVPreserve has released the fourth in the series of Cloud Storage Vendor Profiles compiled by Consultant Seth Anderson. These profiles assess cloud storage services in relation to archival and preservation concerns, looking at issues of data management, reporting, redundancy, accessibility, security, end of service protocols, and adherence to the NDSA’s Levels of Preservation for digital collections.
AVPreserve at International Seminar of Sound and Audiovisual Archives
23 June 2014
AVPreserve President Chris Lacinak has been invited to speak at the Sixth International Seminar of Sound and Audiovisual Archives in Mexico City, Mexico. Themed “The Democratization of Sound and Audiovisual Heritage in the Digital Age”, this year’s seminar is organized by the National Sound Recordings Library of Mexico as part of the Cooperation Program of the Latin American Summits: “Sound and Audiovisual IBERMEMORIA”, proposed by Mexico and the Latin American General Secretariat (SEGIB). The seminar promotes the conservation, use, and re-use of sound and audiovisual heritage in Latin America under the Cooperation Program’s efforts to establish a model for the integral conservation of sound, audiovisual, and filmic documents that make up the heritage of the countries of the region.
AVPreserve Sponsoring AV Archives Night Party
12 June 2014
AV Archives Night || Ensuring Access @ SAA 2014
Episode 10 of More Podcast, Less Process Now Available
9 June 2014
Episode #10 of “More Podcast, Less Process”, the archives podcast co-produced by METRO and AVPreserve, is now available for streaming and download. This episode is “Archival Manoeuvres: Managing Digitization Projects” with guests Miwa Yokoyama (Digital Project Manager, Carnegie Hall) and Mitch Brodsky (Digital Archives Manager, New York Philharmonic). Carnegie Hall and the Philharmonic are both in the midst of large scale digitization projects involving their historic institutional collections, primed towards increasing researcher access to the materials and making the content more broadly usable by the entire organization. Miwa and Mitch talk about the differences and similarities between their respective projects (in-house v. outsourcing, scope of collections, access points), and provide a helpful breakdown of the challenges, successes, and pro-tips they have encountered. Josh and Jefferson had a lively discussion with our guests, and tried to keep the westside/eastside trash-talking to a minimum.
Two Open-Source Tools For Digital Asset Metadata Management
2 June 2014
In today’s world of digital information, previously disparate archival practices are converging around the need to manage collections at the item level. Media collections require a curatorial approach that demand archivists know certain information about every single object in their care for purposes of provenance, quality control, and appraisal. This is a daunting task for archives, as it asks that they retool or redesign migration and accession workflows. It is exactly in gaps such as these that practical technologies become ever useful.
This article offers case studies regarding two freely-available, open-source digital asset metadata tools—BWF MetaEdit and MDQC. The case studies offer on-the-ground examples of how four institutions recognized a need for metadata creation and validation, and how they employed these new tools in their production and accessioning workflows. By Alex Duryee and Bertram Lyons. This article originally appeared in the Practical Technology for Archives Journal, Issue 2, June 2014.
MDQC 0.2 Released
2 June 2014
Version 0.2 of MDQC has been released for free download. MDQC is a desktop application that reads the embedded metadata of a file or a directory and compares it against a set of rules defined by the user, verifying that the technical and administrative specs of the files are correct. This automates and minimizes the time needed to QC large batches of digitized assets, increasing the efficiency of managing digitization projects. Updates to Version 2.0:
Mapping Standards For Richer Assessments: NDSA Levels Of Digital Preservation And ISO 16363:2012
1 June 2014
The basis of Bertram Lyons’ panel presentation at Digital Preservation 2014. To date, the difficulty and high bar of doing an internal assessment as a Trusted Digital Repository have created a hurdle to the ability of organizations to track or rank their progress towards digital preservation standards. AVP has been working on means of adapting TDR risk assessment by improving reporting options and analyses. Two assessment tools currently in use for digital preservation risk assessment are the NDSA’s Levels of Digital Preservation Matrix (Version 1) and ISO 16363:2012 Audit and Certification of Trustworthy Digital Repositories.
The two tools offer overlapping yet distinct methods of analysis, very useful but resulting in differing reporting classifications and outcomes that are not easy to reconcile. In order to encourage the use of the two tools under one roof, and, especially, to increase the outputs of a standard ISO 16363 assessment, AVP staff have mapped the Levels of Digital Preservation categories to the ISO 16363 requirements. A full paper on the topic will be available here soon.
Linked below is our work that documents the mapping of NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation categories to ISO 16363 criteria and the DigPres14 slidedeck. We offer these as an opportunity for community discourse and involvement. Please evaluate our mappings and let us know what you think to help us work towards a shared mapping that others can employ in a standardized way.
