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We Do Not Preserve, We Sustain
1 May 2014
So it’s Preservation Week — the true Old Home Week (ba-dum-dum!) — and even though the P word is a part of our company name, I am predictably nitpicky (predictably, and perhaps wearisomely, at least to my office mates, the poor kids) of its use for this celebratory week. Now, of course, preservation is probably the best sounding word and the one with the most traction (at least in the US), but overall there are certain burdens that come with the word’s connotations that make advocacy and communication about our profession difficult.
AVPreserve at MAC and MARAC
23 April 2014
AVPreserve will be covering a large portion of the continent this weekend, attending both the Midwest Archives Conference Annual Meeting in Kansas City, MO and the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference Spring Meeting in Rochester, NY. Our newest team member, Senior Consultant Bertram Lyons, will be at MAC and is lucky to travel to one of our favorite American cities. AVPreserve President Chris Lacinak and Senior Consultant Josh Ranger will both be presenting on panels at MARAC. It will be our 5th MARAC conference and we’re excited to finally be participating on panels.
An Introduction To Optical Media Preservation
18 April 2014
As the archival horizon moves forward, optical media will become increasingly significant and prevalent in collections. This paper sets out to provide a broad overview of optical media in the context of archival migration.
Author Alex Duryee begins by introducing the logical structure of compact discs, providing the context and language necessary to discuss the medium. The article then explores the most common data formats for optical media: Compact Disc Digital Audio, ISO 9660, the Joliet and HFS extensions, and the Universal Data Format (with an eye towards DVD-Video). Each format is viewed in the context of preservation needs and what archivists need to be aware of when handling said formats.
Following is a discussion of preservation workflows and concerns for successfully migrating data away from optical media, as well as directions for future research. This is a PDF version of an article that originally appeared in the online Code4Lib Journal, Issue 24, 2014-04-16, ISSN 1940-5758.
AVPreserve Seeking Institution for SAA 2014 Service Project
18 April 2014
In conjunction with the events around Society of American Archivists 2014 annual meeting in Washington, DC, AVPreserve is planning an archival day of service centered on an audiovisual collection. We are currently seeking an institution with an audio, video, film, or mixed audiovisual collection in need of help, and who will be willing and able to allow 10-20 archival professionals into their facilities to work with the collections. Many a/v collections are severely under-processed, a state that inhibits preservation planning, budgeting, and ability to provide access.
Chris Lacinak Instructing NEDCC Preservation Workshop
15 April 2014
AVPreserve President Chris Lacinak will be in Boston this week to conduct an audiovisual preservation workshop on Friday, April 18th. Sponsored by the Northeast Document Conservation Center, Audiovisual Digitization: Preparing for a Successful Preservation Project will walk participants through the various decision points of developing the specifications for a statement of work (SOW) for a video digitization project. The combination of lecture and hands-on activities will help attendees understand the importance of those specifications, the impact and reasoning behind selecting different specifications, and how a well thought out SOW can help make a preservation project run more smoothly and help an organization achieve their preservation goals. A copy of Chris’ white paper Guide to Developing a Request for Proposal for the Digitization of Video (and More) can be downloaded for free from the avpreserve.com Papers and Presentations page.
New Paper on Embedded Metadata
9 April 2014
Newly available on our Papers and Presentations page is AVPreserve President Chris Lacinak‘s paper Embedded Metadata in WAVE Files: A Look Inside Issues and Tools. Embedded metadata is crucial to managing digital assets, supporting activities as varied as making it easy to find and listen to music in iTunes, authenticating the source and content of a photograph, and performing quality control on content that has been digitized from analog sources. The key duties of an archive — promoting findability, usability, and persistence of collections — would be nearly impossible without embedded metadata.
New Cloud Storage Vendor Profiles
1 April 2014
Following up on our recent white paper Nine Things To Consider When Assessing Cloud Storage, AVPreserve is pleased to announce the release of our first three Cloud Storage Vendor Profiles researched and complied by Consultant Seth Anderson. Part of our Feet on The Ground: A Practical Approach to The Cloud initiative, these profiles break down the offerings of third party cloud storage providers from a preservation point of view. Assessment points include Data Management, Reporting/Metadata, Redundancy, Accessibility, Security, End of Service, and adherence to the NDSA’s Levels of Preservation. With many of the preservation decisions to make when dealing with audiovisual and digital media, there are not a lot of cut-and-dried, one-size-fits-all answers. There are options, the selection of which depend greatly on what the goals and capabilities of your organization are, as well as what level of vigilance or of risk you are willing to take on. Our hope is to provide organizations with information that will help them in that decision making process.
AVPreserve At PBS TechCon 2014
1 April 2014
AVPreserve President Chris Lacinak will be speaking at PBS TechCon 2014 taking place April 2nd-4th in Las Vegas, Nevada. The premiere annual gathering on topics related to broadcast technology within in public television, PBS TechCon draws broadcast engineers, information technology and traffic professionals, General Managers, and senior executives representing public media stations from across the globe in order to learn about and discuss new technologies and novel solutions to managing broadcast collections.
Episode 8 of More Podcast, Less Process Unleashed
31 March 2014
Episode #8 of “More Podcast, Less Process”, the archives podcast co-produced by METRO and AVPreserve, is now available for streaming and download. This week’s episode is “The Video Word Made Flesh” with guests Nicole Martin (Multimedia Archivist and Systems Manager, Human Rights Watch), Erik Piil (Digital Archivist, Anthology Film Archives), and Peter Oleksik (Assistant Media Conservator, Museum of Modern Art) discussing the different approaches and challenges of managing video collections for access and preservation. Whether dealing with video in an archival or production environment, there are a number of decision points around digitization, storage, description, and playback, the options for which are highly dependent on the mission and capabilities of the organization. Josh & Jefferson and their guests talk about these issues and all things video. It’s a visual treat for your ears.
New Digital Preservation Services From AVPreserve
24 March 2014
