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Product Process

Less Process More Product was one of the buzz phrases I heard being bandied about like at AMIA 2010 in Philadelphia. (Other popular phrases included, “xxxxx” and “xxxxxx”.) The concept is certainly valuable, especially as a strategy in finding ways to deal with the massive backlog of backlogged collection processing. However, XXXXXX’s and XXXXXX’s originating article, while looking at the management of 20th century archival collections, is focused specifically on paper materials. We are well familiar with the problematic application to audiovisual materials of paper archival practices or ideologies related to areas such as cataloging rules, storage, arrangement, preservation, etc. As such, it would seem wise to, before subscribing wholesale to a nice turn of phrase, better define what is process and what is product in the archiving of audiovisual materials, what are the minimal levels required to perform each, and where do these and other concepts diverge or converge with practices assigned to paper-based materials.

Know Your Rights

At the library the other day I picked up the collected Crisis on Infinite Earths, a multi-title crossing mini-series DC Comics put out in 1985 that rebooted its whole universe of characters. (To save face here I’ll have to state that I also checked out McTeague by Frank Norris and a collection of Gogol short stories. So there.) I guess it’s a sign that I’m not a kid reading comic books in the 1980s anymore, but the two most interesting things to me about the series were 1) my amazement at the astonishingly clunky or just lame superhero/villain names, and 2) the fact that The Joker kills Ted Turner stand-in Harold J Standish III in order to steal ownership to his copyrights over colorized silent comedies (which went from worthless to $26million once colorized). It’s always odd to come across a cultural reference like that which was such a flashpoint at the time but which has faded so much in intensity. It really makes me wonder if my memory is correct, if it really was such a big deal or just something that made an impression on my young mind, like the cancelation of Sledge Hammer! or the popularity of Surf Nazis Must Die.

Whatever the case, I remember what a pariah Ted Turner was at that time (Pariah, by the way, is a character in Crisis on Infinite Earths. He was blamed for the destruction of his planet and was forced to watch planetary destruction occur elsewhere, often being blamed by the locals for causing it. See.) for being an uncouth, greedy monster with no cares for history, artistry, and the like.

I found it kind of interesting then when I ran across this article in the Wall Street Journal (“Haven’t I Heard That Song Before?”) about a recent trend of musical artists re-recording their catalogs in order to gain full rights to (the new versions of) their songs. Rather than just getting a percentage of what the rights managing record company earns from sales and licensing, artists such as Carly Simon and Suzanne Vega can take the full cut by distributing versions of their own songs they record with their own investment. The British band Squeeze has gone so far as to re-record their past hits note-for-note, with the stated goal of having film/tv/commercial producers license the Squeeze-owned replica rather than the label-owned one.

Outside of that last, blatantly commercial example, I don’t think many would classify what Carly Simon is doing in the same category as what Ted Turner did — despite how conceptually similar the actions are. American copyright law does not support moral rights as strongly as other nations do, but it is nonetheless something we keenly feel. Simon is remaking her own (to a degree, if one ignores musicians, producers, etc.) creations and Turner was remaking those of others. One may ask, of course, where exactly the droits d’artiste lie with film when there are so many different contributors to a single work. And one may also wonder at the ways in which Turner’s actions converge with the remix culture or with conceptual and performance artists like Sol Lewitt and Marina Abramović who license or allow others to recreate their works. The moral obligation is so often tied up with the emotional connection one experiences with a work of art that the (il)logic of law seems improper to say the least.

This single tangled thread is just another example — as if another were needed — of how the evolution of copyright law has resulted in a creature that resembles the Island of Dr. Moreau more than the Islands of Galapagos. Confusion and uncertainty are the norm when trying to understand the law as written and its various interpretations. That confusion is compounded by the prevalence of formants/versions/instantiations/etc when dealing with audiovisual materials. Placed side-by-side with no documentation (as can often be the case in archives), how would one be able to tell apart an original and a re-recorded Squeeze song in order to determine ownership? If only given an inventory of titles without the ability to listen to the recording, how does one differentiate “Tom’s Diner” from “Tom’s Diner”?

The answer is disarmingly simple in concept though it appears, for a number of reasons, to be difficult in execution of follow through. Sufficient and accessible documentation, strongly defined metadata schemas that are well conformed to, and, in the case of file-based materials, embedded metadata that travels with the digital object can all provide the means necessary for identification and rights assessment.

As much as condition, obsolescence, and valuation, rights have become a defining factor among the variables that drive preservation activities. Organizations that maintain clear rights to content are more likely to allocate resources toward actions that support reuse and re-licensing. Grants often stipulate an end result of preserved materials being made available for access, something not possible without proper rights. By that same token, some granting agencies will not fund reformatting work if ownership is not documented. This isn’t a death knell for orphan works or works with Gordian rights. The same type of documentation can be valuable in authentication of materials, especially in a digital environment, and in the tracking of due diligence efforts when trying to contact possible rights holders before moving ahead with re-use or preservation.

A major impetus behind the Crisis on Infinite Earths series was an attempt to address issues of continuity and the convoluted explanations that had been created to explain shifts in personalities or events that didn’t jibe with what a writer 40 years prior had conceived. The mess of trying to maintain characters and story lines across decades and multiple authors had led to too many Bobby-Ewing-It-Was-All-A-Dream developments, which also made the comics inscrutable to new readers. The DC answer was to cut off the gangrene and hope the limb would grow back all Swamp Thing like. Archivists are my heros, but I’m not sure they have that exact ability. We’ll just have to stick with emulating Organize and Document Man instead.

— Joshua Ranger

Things That Shouldn’t Be Archived #6 — Thanksgiving Edition

This edition isn’t really in regards to the content of the below. I’ve enjoyed my share of blaxsploitation films and the 42nd Street Forever series. It’s just that watching this hits a little too close to home in reminding me of family holidays when I was growing up…and those hits actually do feel very similar to be whacked with high-heeled shoes.

Jive Turkey

aka Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes “It’s a turf battle over the mean streets of Harlem between Italian mobsters and the black hoodlums living in the neighborhood run by “Big Tony” (Frank DeKove). The fighting becomes intense as each side tries to push the other out, with both groups bringing in their best hit men. Watch for a brutal transvestite mobster who kills with her high-heeled shoes.”

Happy Thanksgiving!

— Joshua Ranger

Dave Rice Addressing Conservation Science Annual/Eastern Analytical Symposium

Following up on some whiz bang panels at IASA/AMIA 2010, Dave Rice was invited to speak today at the Eastern Analytical Symposium (EAS) as part of a special Conservation Science Annual (CSA) symposium entitled Digital Media in Cultural Heritage: New Preservation Technologies. Dave will be discussing Audiovisual Analysis and Quality Control: New Methods using File and Machine Based Metadata which will cover the use of the analytical tools AVPS has been developing — such as DVAnalyzer, BWFMetaEdit, and FATMAP — that help bring new levels of inspection and collection management control to file-based media collections.

The EAS is “the world’s leading community for analytical chemists seeking the highest quality education and career development”, bringing “noted authorities in the field” together to speak to “analytical chemists, managers, and academicians” from across a wide range of fields. Visit http://www.eas.org/ for more information.

The CSA is coordinated in conjunction with the EAS by the New York Conservation Foundation to address the “scientific aspect of the preservation of cultural heritage such as art, architecture and archaeological materials: conservation science, the analytical methods and technology.” Visit http://www.iiconservation.org/events/index.php?idnr=453 for more information.

To step away from be all analytical about things, we’re excited to see all the organizations that are beginning to seriously address the issue of digital preservation and we are proud to be part of the conversation…And we’re proud of Dave, too!

Creating History To Maintain History

Among the less savory identities I tried on in my middle school years as I fished around from some sort of individuality was that of a sports stat head — the kind of person that would give a detailed speech on how to pitch for the Public Speaking section of Language Arts class but who wouldn’t pick up a baseball unless cleaning up after one’s tomboy sisters.

I liked to think that I distinguished myself through my abstruse selectivity of which teams or athletes I focused my attentions on, leaning heavily towards the underdog, the old-timer nearing or beyond 40 years of age (in a pre-PED era, mind you), the outlier, the mudder… Watching Dale Murphy pop home runs in a sad, empty Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium was much more interesting to me than another Montana-Rice downfield bomb.

I have a much deeper appreciation of Pete Incaviglia than you do.

(Caveat: At that time, my hometown was well outside the terrestrial broadcast range of all but one professional sports team, so I really didn’t have a lot of choice in what teams the networks or cable would occasionally show, and thus for whom I would root.)

I think about this period a lot because of the relation between the sorting and arranging of baseball cards on which I spent many a weekend and my current workaday career. But the topic resonated in a different way after reading a recent-ish article in the Times about the Major League Baseball archives and the cataloging/tagging of footage. Sports and porn have been traditional leaders in the development of video technologies and distribution methods, and the article shows that MLB is working at a high level of metadata capture, and making that metadata work for them.

The amount of intellectual control evinced in the article is impressive, and the methodology/workflow in its documentation is, for lack of better words, reallyreallycool (he said, pushing his glasses up). Switching to the other side of the plate to bat, however, I think there are some further instructive lessons here. First, no archivist should feel inadequate. MLB has a number of incentives driving these efforts, incentives that are several degrees of magnitude greater — in terms of fiscal economics — than for most AV collections. The almost hourly need during baseball season to distribute information and content externally via the web and broadcast programs, internally via workflows that monitor games and umpiring, and archivally via the identification and preservation of historical events lies outside the norm of most archives.

The second lesson is also about economic incentive, but of social economics rather than strict monetary concerns. One facet at the core of the popularity of sports is narrative. Stories from baseball’s past are repeated at least yearly; stories from a career are repeated at least weekly; stories from a season are repeated at least daily. There are grand narrative arcs and smaller subplots that help define, reinforce, assess, predict, and synthesize events, personalities, and the organization as a whole. The footage of Yogi Berra jumping into Don Larsen’s arms after his World Series perfect game is hauled out during the post-season to help give shape to what is about to occur and why it matters (i.e., why you should be watching): these are the moments when the pressures make the normal activities of the regular season more difficult, when the great ones rise to the challenge, and when there is a constant opportunity to see something historic happen from unexpected sources. After the 2010 post-season, footage of Roy Halladay will now be forever linked with the Don Larsen footage. The new story snaps neatly into the continuing narrative to expand and confirm: Heros still exist. The present is tied to the past, which establishes an underlying structure of stability to the unpredictability of life. There is value derived in looking back and hope in looking forward.

Based on my ramblings, the lesson here obviously isn’t one on proper gramatical and logical structure. Rather, what I think we can pull out from the MLB experience is, at a basic level, further proof in the value of a comprehensive approach to metadata. The greater the degree of intellectual control, the greater the degree of reuse of materials. Enabling deeper levels of access promotes more extensive access and novel uses of assets, and these efforts can be enhanced and made more efficient by identifying the parameters of what data is most pertinent.

At a more complex level is a lesson in the high value of actively cultivating social significance and in developing stories around collections to better advocate for them and promote access. The past occurs[?] and is documented, but it requires exposure and contextualization to maintain wider relevance. Archives occur (though they are not necessarily documented), but their contents require exposure and contextualization to promote their relevance within an institution and to a wider public.

It is not that un-monetized content is less valuable, but its true value is just more difficult to express — just as it’s more difficult to define the benefit of the utility infielder, the bunter, or the long reliever in comparison to the power hitter and the staff ace. Of course, that divide in baseball has been narrowed by the hard work done by stat head sabermetricians over the recent past number of years. Hmmm…

— Joshua Ranger

AVPS Funds New AMIA Scholarship To Honor World Day For Audiovisual Heritage

In celebration of World Day for Audiovisual Heritage 2010, AudioVisual Preservation Solutions, in collaboration with the Association of Moving Image Archivists is pleased to announce the YADA! Scholarships for Education in Fundraising (PDF of news release). Three annual scholarships will funded by AVPS and awarded through the AMIA Awards Committee aimed at providing moving image and sound archivists with opportunities for education in fundraising.

Background:

On World Day for Audiovisual Heritage 2009, AVPS announced the Your Archive Deserves Advocacy! initiative (https://www.avpreserve.com/avpsresources/about-yada/), an effort focused on promoting the people and stories behind archives as well as providing resources that support advocacy. As part of the YADA! initiative, and in celebration of World Day for Audiovisual Heritage 2010, AVPS is funding three separate scholarship awards to help offset the cost of attending Foundation Center training classes. The Foundation Center is a national nonprofit service organization whose mission is to strengthen the nonprofit sector by providing information and resources that enable improved knowledge and access to philanthropic organizations. Their in-person and web-based workshops offer guidance and resources to help organizations obtain grants and other funding opportunities. The Foundation Center has regional centers for resources and training in Atlanta, Cleveland, New York, San Francisco, and Washington DC. For more information on the Foundation Center and the classes they offer, visit foundationcenter.org.

How does Fundraising Relate to Advocacy?

The activities involved in caring for audiovisual collections extend well beyond daily efforts such as arrangement, cataloging, reformatting, and providing access. These other activities involve an equally extensive set of endeavors that can roughly be defined as advocacy, including:

• acquisition of funding
• communication with administration and other organizational departments
• public promotion and outreach
• planning
• community involvement, and more

Congratulations To 2010 NYART Award Winners

A hearty congratulations to the well-deserving FOAVPS (Friends of AVPS) Grace Lile, Archivist and Director of Operations at WITNESS, and the fine folks at the Jazz Loft Project who will be honored the evening of October 20th, 2010 by the Archivists Roundtable of Metropolitan New York.

Grace has been awarded the 2010 Archival Achievement Award for the spectacular work she has done to establish and maintain the WITNESS video archive documenting worldwide human rights and social justice issues. Along with the help of a dedicated staff and interns Grace’s efforts have included planning and implementation of extensive cataloging and digitization projects that will make the archive more searchable and usable by researchers and others, as well as the development of innovative guidelines and tools for the submission of video from across the globe in variable formats. Our own Chris Lacinak will be one of the proud presenters of Grace’s award.

The Jazz Loft Project is being honored with the Award for Innovative Use of Archives. The access to the treasure of photographs and audio recordings of jazz musicians captured by Eugene Smith in his 6th Avenue New York City loft from 1957-1965 opened up by the Project is establishing new levels of knowledge about the history of jazz during one of its most vibrant periods. The past year has also seen the fruition of years of work from Sam Stephenson, Jazz Loft Project Director, and contributors from The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, WNYC Radio, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Alfred A. Knopf, and the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. Activities have included the publishing of a book on Eugene Smith and the Jazz Loft, a series of programs from Sarah Fishko on WNYC Radio in New York, and a travelling exhibition of materials that opened at the New York Public Library.

Congratulations also to the Leon Levy Foundation, winner of the award for Outstanding Support of Archives. The Leon Levy Foundation is a not-for-profit foundation established to continue Leon Levy’s philanthropic legacy and to build on his vision, encouraging and supporting excellence in six broad areas: Understanding the Ancient World; Arts and Humanities; Preservation of Nature and Gardens; Brain Research and Science; Human Rights; and Jewish Culture. The generous support of such foundations and granting agencies help make sure that organizations like WITNESS and the Jazz Loft Project can do their valuable work.

Hope to see you at the awards ceremony!

Process

When I was nigh about 8 or 9 years old, I decided I wanted to learn Russian. This wasn’t an idea that just floated into my head out of nowhere — as a Cold War child, the Soviets were very much front and center in my consciousness. (Though that situation also may have been because I am a communist anchor baby and the brain implants I received were just doing their work.) I could pretend to a precocious nobility here and claim that this desire arose from some sort of personal glasnost. However, the fact is, I was a punk who had already supped on a steady diet of Mad and Cracked, and learning Russian sounded very anti-establishment to me.

Of course, living in a Northwest logging town, it wasn’t as if there were regular Russian classes available, so I turned to the only resource I knew — the children’s section at the County Library. Probably not surprisingly (there must have been earlier anchor babies than I), there was a Russian picture-book dictionary in the stacks, which I happily added to my pile of Mad back issues, Ray Bradbury, and Encyclopedia Brown.

When I got home, I found the prospect to be more difficult than I had imagined. Seems that Russian uses a different alphabet, don’t you know. Luckily, there was a handy transliteration chart in the back that showed what the Cyrillic letters were equated to in American. This was obviously the key I was looking for that would allow me to translate English words into Russian. If D=Д, O=О, and G=Г, then ДОГ was DOG.

I tested my new found knowledge by applying it in reverse, taking the Russian words from the picture dictionary and transforming them into English. To my frustration and confusion, it didn’t work. How could ‘собака’ be ‘dog’? I had already figured that word out. It didn’t make sense. After a few more attempts, I put the defective book aside and moved on to something more immediately satisfying, like Pixie Stix or something.

************************************************

Eventually I figured out the difference between translation and transliteration — that or I was highly skilled at buffaloing my foreign language teachers — but it wouldn’t be the last time I would have to deal with overcoming a conceptual shift in order to learn a new skill. I think about this a lot not only because the speed of changing technologies has presented a steady stream of shifts within my lifetime, but also because of the huge conceptual shifts that are a part of media archiving and preservation practices. Of course we all are quite familiar with the differences between best practices within traditional paper archiving and those required for time-based media — though we surprisingly still have to hammer away at those to be acknowledged.

Of great help along with that hammer have been other tools developed over the years to specifically address the needs of media preservation: The AD Strips and other resources developed by Image Permanence Institute, the FACET tool and guidelines out of Indiana University, optical scanning of mechanical audio carriers developed through collaboration of Library of Congress and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the development of new metadata schemas such as PBCore that better address the variability of how media is produced and used. It seems almost banal to mention them now, like writing an ode to a ratchet set, but isn’t that a whole lot better than trying to make do with a couple pairs of pliers in a space that’s too close to get very much leverage or movement in?

Which now makes me think, maybe it isn’t entirely a reconceptualization of ideology that is important here, but also a initial conceptualization of tools and processes. We are working towards the same basic goal — getting the nut off the bolt; establishing access to and maintaining existence of an object and its content — but the avenues towards that endpoint are quite different. Which now makes me think about the current major conceptual shift in archiving and preservation: the shift in practices dealing with analog media to those dealing with file-based and born digital media. Perhaps the struggle to establish standards and practices is not entirely a problem of thinking about the management of digital objects differently than physical objects, but also an issue of not having a full set of tools for inspection and management.

We make use of a number of tools such as dvgrab, ffmpeg, DATXtract, Live Capture Plus, MediaInfo, and PBCore, but most of these were not developed specifically for archiving needs. As a result, AVPS has made the development of tools and resources a major component of our work. We have been involved in developing DVAnalyzer, which allows a user to inspect and analyze the quality of a DV stream captured over firewire from DVCam; BWF MetaEdit, which allows a user to view and edit the embedded metadata in a Broadcast WAV file; PBCore Instantiationizer, which automates the creation of PBCore instantiation elements based on the embedded metadata in file-based assets; and a number of other internal tools or resources in development that can be used to assess or manage file-based collections.

Of course we aren’t the only ones working on this. For example, METRO’s new book Digitization in the Real World is full of strategies and methodologies for digital collection management, and the Dance Heritage Coalition has been doing innovative work on the development of online cataloging utilities and access. What is needed is a greater allocation of efforts and resources directed towards developing these new tools before too much is lost. The make up of digital media will not allow us to wait 50 years before addressing persistence and continuing access. Мы должны подействовать теперь, comrade.

— Joshua Ranger

METRO And Archivists Roundtable Co-Host “Born Digital AV” Workshop With Chris Lacinak

Continuing the AVPS commitment to education and community participation, Chris Lacinak will be conducting the workshop “Born Digital AV: A Primer for Archivists and Caretakers of Moving Image and Sound Collections” on Wednesday, October 6, 2010. The event is co-hosted by METRO and the New York Archivists Roundtable and will take place at the METRO training center at 57 East 11th Street in Manhattan.

The deluge of born digital audiovisual materials will be hitting archives soon if it hasn’t started already, presenting new challenges to asset management and preservation combined with accelerated obsolescence and degradation factors which will not allow a passive approach to archiving. From the description:

“This hands-on primer will introduce archivists and caretakers of digital file-based moving image and sound collections to utilities and processes that will help them perform routine archival tasks in the file-based domain. Activities will include creating and validating checksums; entering, editing, reviewing, parsing and using embedded metadata; identifying file characteristics and attributes; discussion of wrappers and codecs; and discussion of obsolescence monitoring and normalization.

By the end of this program, participants will:
• Know how to perform routine archival tasks in the digital file-based domain
• Gain a basic working knowledge of digital files to enable better communication with other stakeholders in the digital object’s lifecycle”

So come learn the basics of what you need to know to be prepared for the changing media landscape and to be a leader in the preservation and integration of digital materials within your organization. More registration information is available on the METRO website at http://bit.ly/azoc4n or in their September Digitech Newsletter. While you’re there, also check out the information on Gawain Weaver’s upcoming Care and Identification of Photographic Materials workshop as well as METRO’s great new book Digitization in the Real World.

Metafun And Metagames

We here at AVPS work hard but, because we really enjoy our work, we find a lot of fun in it to. Like with metadata. Sure, in some ways metadata is just a tool — it does a lot of heavy lifting and is seen as blandly compartmentalizing what is of real value, the content of the object described.

Par example, this image was posted as NARA’s Historical Document of the Day:

“…Leathernecks use scaling ladders to storm ashore at Inchon in amphibious invasion September 15, 1950…”

Of course one thinks beautiful black and white photo, important historical documentation, etc., but the content considered from a wider view also prompts thoughts about how amazing it is that material like this is recorded in the midst of such circumstances. Whatever your feelings about the actions involved, it’s pretty impressive that there are people trained by the military (and has been a tradition of doing such) to go out with the troops and document what is happening on film or video (or digital capture card). This reminds me of some ideas I’ve been playing around with about the roots of independent cinema in military training from the World Wars, but that’s another post.

Like any good archivist, however, after looking at the content I began to look at the associated catalog record. Part of the record description states “General Photograph File of the U.S. Marine Corps, 1927 – 1981; Records of the U.S. Marine Corps, 1775 – 9999 ; Record Group 127; National Archives.” (my emphasis). Records of the U.S. Marine Corps, 1775 – 9999…That means the records date back to 1775, but also that the expectation is for the records to continue on for some time into the future (or maybe just that 9999 is the new 2012).

Digging around some more, the creator is listed as “Department of Defense. Department of the Navy. U.S. Marine Corps. (09/18/1947 – )”, which points to the period when around WWII the various services began to develop centralized media production and distribution departments. This also suggests an organizational realignment within the Marine Corps but also within the structure of the government. You can see, via NARA’s great online catalog, that associated creator names include Department of the Navy. U.S. Marine Corps. (1834 – 09/18/1947), U.S. Marine Corps. (1798 – 1834), and Continental Marines. (11/10/1775 – 1798). A little research shows that 9/18/47 is actually the date that the Department of Defense was officially established (partly as a way to decrease inter-service rivalry), and thus the name change. Makes one wonder what the other naming changes relate to historically and how they came about…

A short history lesson and an urge to learn more — Thank you, metadata!

Oh jeeze I’m a nerd.

— Joshua Ranger

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