Ignite
AVPreserve Accepting Applications for the Role of Senior Consultant
7 July 2015
We’re growing! And AVPreserve is looking for people to grow with us in the role of Senior Consultant.
Reading In: Analyzing Embedded Metadata in Digital Images
6 July 2015
When the news came out about accused South Carolina church shooter Dylann Roof’s website and the photographs that had been posted there, I visited the site and downloaded the package of digital images out of curiosity, as an archivist, to take a look inside the images. I was interested to see the metadata, to break open the files — so to speak — and evaluate the bytes themselves. As archivists, that is exactly what we do with any collection of digital objects. We look under the hood. We look for patterns and information that will help us understand the context in which the files were created, and to help us identify any evidence that might inform us of the provenance, the originality, the history of the documentary resources we have acquired.
A Comparison Of Inventory & Assessment Tools
30 June 2015
AVP has developed or contributed to the development of several tools for the inventory, assessment, and preservation prioritization of physical audiovisual materials, ranging in approach from collection level or format level analysis down to item level cataloging and selection. Primary among these are three tools: MediaScore and MediaRivers from Indiana University, our Catalyst inventory tool, and the AVCC inventory and planning tool.
The approach one takes in such preservation efforts and the tools one might use depends on the scope of collections, the budgets and staffing available, and the end goals of the project. This spreadsheet presents a comparative analysis of the tools available on our site to help you determine which one might be right for your collection. Visit our tools page to access the applications themselves.
Selecting A Tool For Inventory & Assessment
30 June 2015
Perhaps because archives generally deal with unique materials, the internal thinking tends to be that their needs for collection management are unique — particular to the scope of the collection and to the history and character of the institution. Not that I entirely disagree with this. Whereas things like ISBNs and Library of Congress Call Numbers, for example, work splendidly for published materials and lending libraries, that kind of centralized identification system does not make sense for original and singular manuscripts, oral histories, etc, and therefore archives establish their own identification and arrangement system, naming conventions, and other practices that may be more codified in other situations.
Announcing the Release of AVCC Inventory & Collection Management Tool
29 June 2015
We are pleased to announce the release of AVCC, an open-source web application for the rapid inventory of physical film, video, and audio materials. Developed with funding from the Library of Congress’ National Recording Preservation Board – in addition to funding support from the Metropolitan New York Library Resource Council and New York State Documentary Heritage Program for previous versions of the tool – AVCC provides a series of inventory templates and quantitative reports that promote simple and fast documentation and analysis of collections of audiovisual materials.
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.
New Cloud Storage Vendor Profile
11 June 2015
AVPreserve is pleased to announce the release of the next profile in our Cloud Storage for Preservation Vendor Analysis series. The newest profile looks at Amazon Web Services Simple Storage Service, or AWS S3. Like Amazon’s Glacier, S3 is a low cost solution that takes advantage of the power and size of the AWS server farms. However, whereas Glacier is a cold storage service, S3 is better suited for files that require frequent access and that require lower storage needs, such as for text, images, research data, and smaller audiovisual access copies.
