Chris Lacinak Presenting At ARSC 2013

AVPreserve President Chris Lacinak will be attending and presenting on a panel at the 2013 Association for Recorded Sound Collections annual conference to be held in Kansas City, Missouri May 15th-18th. Kansas City is one of our favorite American cities, and its deep ties to the history of Jazz and Blues make it especially poignant location this year considering that an overriding theme of the conference will be discussion of the recently released National Recording Preservation Plan.

Chris will be on a panel with Josh Harris from the University of Illinois and Mike Casey and Patrick Feaster from the University of Indiana. The panel ties into the reports’s call to action by looking at three recent large scale census and inventory projects that are forming the basis of institutional preservation plans. Chris will be presenting on our work with the New Jersey Network (NJN) to inventory and provide a roadmap to preserve the 100,000 item program library that was left after the station was shuttered by the New Jersey government. For the project we used our new Catalyst software, a system we developed in-house that uploads multiple images taken of assets by on-site photographers to a centralized server, enabling an off-site cataloging team to create database records from the images remotely. The end result is a database containing both the images and metadata, enabling planning while mitigating the need and cost of accessing the physical materials until selected for reformatting.

Chris is excited as always to be participating in the ARSC conference, and doubly excited to publicly present Catalyst for the first time. We believe our new system can have a lot of impact on the ability to be proactive and more effective in preservation planning, and we look forward to getting feedback on it. Check out the panel and say hi to Chris if you’re not too busy having fun in KC.