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AV Archives Night SAA 2015 Last Call
24 June 2015
AVPreserve is putting out one more call for submissions for our AV Archives Night to take place at the SAA 2015 conference in Cleveland, Ohio. AV Archives Night is a celebration of archives and audiovisual collections regionally located near the conference, as well as the a promotion of the work that archivists are doing to preserve our AV heritage. AV Archives Night 2015 will take place on Wednesday August 19th at a loft on High Avenue in Cleveland, just blocks away from the conference site. This is a free event open to any conference attendee or other student/professional in the area, and refreshments will be provided.
ARSC Guide To Audio Preservation
19 June 2015
The ARSC Guide to Audio Preservation is a practical introduction to caring for and preserving audio collections. It is aimed at individuals and institutions that have recorded sound collections but lack the expertise in one or more areas to preserve them. Among the many expert authors of the Guide, AVP President Chris Lacinak contributed Chapter 7, “What to do after digitization”, and Senior Consultant Kara Van Malssen contributed Chapter 9, “Disaster prevention, preparedness, and response”.
The ARSC Guide to Audio Preservation was commissioned for and sponsored by the National Recording Preservation Board of the Library of Congress, and was co-published by the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC), the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), and The Library of Congress. More information can be found on the CLIR website.
Guide To Developing A Request For Proposal For The Digitization Of Audio
18 June 2015
Whether outsourcing or digitizing in-house, collection managers need to be able to define the parameters and specifications for preservation reformatting in order to properly care for their assets and to control and understand the outcomes of the digitization process. In association with the ARSC Guide to Audio Preservation, AVP is releasing this Guide to RFPs for the Digitization of Audio, along with recommendations for technical and preservation metadata to collect during the process and a sample spreadsheet to obtain estimated pricing from digitization vendors. Every digitization project and organizational requirements are different; this guide is a starting point for creating an RFP specific to those needs.
AVPreserve Releases MDQC Version 0.3 Update
15 June 2015
AVPreserve is pleased to announce the release of version 0.3 of our free MDQC tool. MDQC (Metadata Quality Control) is an open source utility that reads the embedded metadata of a file or directory and compares it against a set of rules for file specifications that are defined by the user for a specific file type. For instance, organizations have used MDQC on files being returned from a vendor or in-house lab to verify technical parameters applied in digitization or transcoding, such as bit depth, sample rate, codec, and aspect ratio, as well as non-technical parameters such as copyright statements, title information, identifiers and more. MDQC automates and minimizes the time needed to QC large batches of digitized or reformatted assets, and can be used on any file type supported by ExifTool and MediaInfo.
From Mass Digitization To Mass Description: Indiana University’s Strategy To Overcome The Next Great Challenge
8 June 2015
Over the past decade, much focus has been placed on mass digitization of legacy audiovisual collections. With progress on this front, today there is a new focus emerging: mass description. In 2014 Indiana University (IU) began an effort to digitize hundreds of thousands of hours of audiovisual materials from across campus, leading to the challenge of describing this extraordinarily diverse set of materials both at scale and at a sufficient level of granularity to enable meaningful and effective discovery.
In 2015, with the support of AVP, IU began a strategic planning project to research, analyze and report on technologies, workflows, staffing, timeline and budgets to address this challenge. This presentation, given by Jon Dunn and Chris Lacinak at the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) conference in 2016, delves into the background, goals, approach and next steps for this work.
AVPS Moving to Industry City
26 May 2015
After six-plus years in Midtown Manhattan, AVPS is moving offices to Industry City in Brooklyn. A former manufacturing, storage, and shipping hub located on the Brooklyn waterfront in the Sunset Park neighborhood, Industry City is an exciting new office and light manufacturing development zone that is a growing home to start-ups, restaurants, artists, local crafts and food producers, and many more. We’re very excited to join businesses like MakerBot, Blue Marble Ice Cream, and the Brooklyn Nets in this space primed for innovation and collaboration, two of the hallmarks of what drives the work we do.
AVPreserve Releases Two Metadata Management Tutorials for Preservation Week 2015
27 April 2015
Pixels, Lines, And Bits: An AV Preservation Primer
16 April 2015
On Thursday, April 16, 2015, Kathryn Gronsbell spoke at the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) in Brooklyn. The event, “PIXELS, LINES, AND BITS: An A/V Preservation Primer for Artists”, was a discussion around personal archiving and preservation approaches for artists interested in stabilizing their work so that it can be available in the short- and long-term.
The presentation and Q+A session was an introduction to concepts like preserving and managing media, how you can leverage your time and money to make more sustainable decisions, and what the benefits might be now and in the future. Thank you to NYFA and Independent Media Arts Preservation for helping organize this event. See NYFA’s Highlight Reel from the discussion.
The Things We Do: This Must Be The Wrong Lock Because I Have The Right Key
19 March 2015
Ah, the question. What do you do? Saying that we do consulting and software development isn’t inaccurate but it never feels adequate either, because it leaves out so much of what is critical about being good at what we do.
Indiana University Announces Release of MediaSCORE and MediaRIVERS
12 March 2015
Indiana University announces the release of free, open source media preservation prioritization software created in collaboration with AVPreserve.
