AVPreserve at New England Archivists Spring Meeting

AVPreserve is proud to participating at the New England Archivists Annual Meeting taking place March 20th-22nd in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. AVPreserve President Chris Lacinak will be presenting on two separate panels. First, Chris will join Yvonne Ng (Archivist, WITNESS) and Jane Mandelbaum (IT Project Manager at Library of Congress) on the Free Open Source Tools panel where he will speak about Fixity, MDQC, Interstitial, and AVCC, four free digital preservation applications that AVPreserve has released in the past year. On Saturday Chris will be speaking with Elizabeth Walters (Program Officer for Audiovisual Materials, Weissman Preservation Center, Harvard Library) on The End of Analog Audiovisual Media: The cost of inaction & what you can do about it. He will discuss our new Cost of Inaction Calculator — a tool that helps archives quantify and effectively articulate what is lost in the way of access, intellect and finances by not acting to reformat collections — and our Catalyst inventory tool which was used to help the New Jersey Network efficiently create an item level inventory of 100,000 audiovisual items so they could begin to prioritize and plan for preservation.

AVPreserve Digital & Metadata Preservation Specialist Alex Duryee will also be on hand to discuss Developing a Preservation Framework for Complex Digital Artworks with Desiree Alexander and Dianne Dietrich (Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library). Over the past several months AVPreserve has been consulting with Cornell on approaches to preserve and continue providing access to born-digital multimedia artwork dating back from the mid 1990s, many originally available only on CD-ROM and DVD-ROM. It’s great to see Cornell taking a lead on this area of broad concern, and we’re pleased to be able to support their efforts.

We love the opportunities at conferences like NEA to be a part of the ongoing development of the profession. So stop and chat with Chris and Alex to talk archives, but also because, well, buttons.