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Association Of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) 2009 Accessioning & Managing Born Digital Video

Born Digital File-Based Video recording is pervasive. Tape is not even an option on many new cameras being sold today. This shift has made accessioning and management of file based content and the associated challenges a new reality to archives. This presentation offers insights into the challenges that born digital file-based video brings to your archive and strategies for managing it.

• AMIA PRESENTATION 2009 (Slides and Text, PDF)

Association For Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) 2009 Strategies For Preserving Born Digital Audio

A presentation focusing on obsolescence monitoring and normalization as strategies for managing born digital audio.

• SLIDES AND TEXT
• FULL SLIDES, NO TEXT (BETTER FOR VIEWING DIAGRAMS)

Instantiations, Components, And Essence Tracks

As posted to PBCore Resources

PBCore instantiation records work well for documenting renditions of an asset that are composed of a single tape or file, but when an instantiation requires multiple tapes, reels or files what should the protocol be? How can PBCore be used to efficiently document a rendition of an asset that is composed of multiple objects, each with its own set of technical metadata? Disclaimer, this post is based on my own personal experience in using PBCore 1.2.1 and resulting conclusions.

Within a PBCore asset record every element may be applied multiple times (one asset may have as many titles, contributors, and instantiations as one desires); however from the perspective of the instantiation (which is a single rendition of an asset) much of the descriptive information may only occur once. For instance, an instantiation may only have one formatDigital (i.e. one mime_type), one formatGenerations, one formatFileSize. The PBCore instantiation element appears to be designed to both document a single item or a single file and to document “all the details on how the asset is actualized” (quote from the PBCore 1.2.1 XSD). However, in some cases, in order to document how an instantiation actualizes the asset, multiple files or multiple items are necessary. Here are three situational examples:

– an asset describing a musical album may have an instantiation that is one CD, then the digitized version of that CD comprises 10 digital files each representing a track. The 10 digital items together represent the same asset as the single-item CD,

– an asset describing a film exists in a collection as two instantiations: a three-reel 35mm film print and a single Digibeta (this is similar to the example that Mary Miller describes at http://www.pbcoreresources.org/article/dealing_with_multi_part_instantiations/),

– an asset documenting a television episode contains two instantiations: one being a single Digibeta tape and another as two elementary stream files (an .m2v video stream and an .wav audio stream).

All three of these examples refer to audiovisual material that changes in number of components needed to represent an asset over the reformatting process. In some types of reformatting the number goes from more to less (like example 2, the film transfer) and in some cases from less to more (link example 1, the digitization of a CD).

If PBCore instantiations are understood to only represent single-item instantiations then the individual digitized tracks of a CD or the individual reels of a film print would need to be documented in their own asset records, where one asset represents the CD and then 10 other assets represent the individual digitized tracks. This is obviously less efficient than treating the set of digitized tracks as one instantiation and the CD as another instantiation of the same asset. Another option could be to zip or tar the 10 tracks into one file, but this requirement for effective PBCore description has its own disadvantages. Alternatively a directory that contains the 10 file-based tracks could be defined by the instantiation.

Best practices for documenting multi-object instantiations are not clear. With the m2v and wav elementary streams, the two files need to work together to represent the asset, but they have their own unique values for ‘formatDigital’, ‘formatFileSize’, ‘formatDataRate’ and possibly their own ‘formatLocation’. All of these values may only occur once per instantiation. For the m2v and wav elementary streams to be defined as a single instantiation some options are:

– the two files could be moved into a directory or folder, which would serve the role of an audiovisual wrapper. In this case the formatDigital would be ‘application/x-not-regular-file’ (referring to the directory) the formatFileSize could be the directory size, etc.

– or the data from the individual files could be shoehorned into the instantiation fields meant for individual files, thus formatDigital would be “video/mpeg audio/x-wav” and formatFileSize could be the sum of the two file sizes.

– or the m2v and wav files could be either zipped or tarred into a single file or multiplexed into an audiovisual wrapper, so that the collection is then represented by a single file (the analog equivalent would be splicing together film reels in order that the metadata more cleanly fits into an instantiation record).

None of these options are ideal for describing a complex object, since potentially the levels of quality of resulting technical documentation become less precise, the implementation of instantiation becomes less standardized, or the metadata process potentially burdens collection management. This is the same sort of challenge that occurred in pre-1.2 versions of PBCore where discrete track-level metadata values had to be concatenated and labeled into single fields like formatDataRate = “Total 1930 kilobits/sec; Video 1700 kilobits/sec; Audio 230 kilobits/sec”. This procedure was documented by pbcore.org at http://www.pbcore.org/PBCore/formatDataRate.html that “the pbcoreInstantiation container should not be repeated in order to express a video data rate and an associated audio data rate. The two combined are part of a single instantiation for an asset”.

I have two suggestions regarding this potential challenge. The first would be documenting best practices the use PBCore 1.2.1 as is to document these complex objects in a way that fits the various examples above. The second suggestion would involve a modification to PBCore which would be to integrate an additional element in between instantiation and essenceTrack, perhaps called ‘component’. Typically PBCore would document single-component instantiations; however in cases where a single instantiation is made up of multiple tapes, reels or files, the instantiation would have as many component records each with its own technical metadata.

In this arrangement some of the values currently attached to instantiation would move to the component level. Whereas PBCore 1.2.1 is

instantiation { {formatIdentifier, formatIdentifierSource } dateCreated, dateIssued, formatPhysical, formatDigital, formatLocation, formatMediaType, formatGenerations, formatFileSize, formatTimeStart, formatDurations, formatColors, formatTracks, formatChannelConfiguration, language, alternativeModes {essenceTrack see below } {dateAvailableStart, dateAvailableEnd } { annotation }

essenceTrack {essenceTrackType, essenceTrackIdentifier, essenceTrackIdentifierSource, essenceTrackStandard, essenceTrackEncoding, essenceTrackDataRate, essenceTrackTimeStart, essenceTrackDuration, essenceTrackBitDepth, essenceTrackSamplingRate, essenceTrackFrameSize, essenceTrackAspectRatio, essenceTrackFrameRate, essenceTrackLanguage, essenceTrackAnnotation }

the incorporation of a component level of data could look like

instantiation { assemblyMode, formatMediaType, formatGenerations, formatFileSize, formatColors,, formatChannelConfiguration, language, alternativeModes, {dateAvailableStart, dateAvailableEnd } { annotation }

component { {componentIdentifier, componentIdentifierSource } dateCreated, dateIssued, componentPhysical, componentDigital, componentLocation, componentTimeStart, componentDuration, componentTracks, {essenceTrack see below } }

essenceTrack {essenceTrackType, essenceTrackIdentifier, essenceTrackIdentifierSource, essenceTrackStandard, essenceTrackEncoding, essenceTrackDataRate, essenceTrackTimeStart, essenceTrackDuration, essenceTrackBitDepth, essenceTrackSamplingRate, essenceTrackFrameSize, essenceTrackAspectRatio, essenceTrackFrameRate, essenceTrackLanguage, essenceTrackAnnotation }

In this draft I added a field called ‘assemblyMode’. Something like assemblyMode would be needed to document how the components are related to each other. In the case of the digitized CD, the components would be assembled through concatenation and played back-to-back, so assemblyMode could equal “concatenation”. With the m2v and wav elementary streams the assemblyMode would be “multiplexion” since the component needs to be multiplexed for playback. In the case of “concatenation” the total duration of the instantiation would equal the total durations of the components whereas if the assemblyMode is “multiplexion” then the instantiation’s duration is roughly equal to the duration of the component, so the value is relevant to how other pieces of metadata are determined.

Since the instantiation should contain “all the details on how the asset is actualized” (as stated by the PBCore 1.2.1 XSD), adding an addition element level to accommodate multi-tape or multi-objects would help this goal be achieved with cleaner and more descriptive data. I’m interested to hear if this is an issue another other PBCore users are thinking about and if there are any easier solutions that I’m missing.

David Rice

AudioVisual Preservation Solutions

AVPS Participating In “Preservation Oriented Production Workflows” Session At The AMIA Annual Conference On November 13, 2008

Chris Lacinak of AudioVisual Preservation Solution will be speaking at a session at the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) annual meeting in Savannah on the topic of “Preservation Oriented Production Workflows”. He will be chairing a panel joined by Brian Hoffman and Kara Van Malssen of NYU, and Jonathan Marmor of WNET.

The summary program description is as follows:

“Traditional workflow models pose great challenges to preserving and managing content over the long term. After years of grappling with them, these challenges have become all too evident to the AMIA community. A new model of production has begun to evolve from this awareness, and with some surprising consequences.”

We welcome all AMIA Conference attendees to join us as we share in our experiences while defining a new model of preservation oriented production workflows that will undoubtedly impact the future of archives.

The website for the 2008 Annual AMIA conference is here:
http://www.amiaconference.com/index.html

AVPS Participating In The 125th Annual Audio Engineering Society (AES) Convention In San Francisco October 2-5, 2008

Chris Lacinak of AudioVisual Preservation Solutions, as well as a long term participating member of AES, will make several contributions to this year’s convention. He will be presenting at a tutorial titled “Audio Preservation at the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center (NAVCC)”, and will introduce Brad McCoy, who is a Senior Sound Engineer at The National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, Culpeper, Va.

“This tutorial will discuss audio preservation at the Library of Congress’ National Audio-Visual Conservation Center (NAVCC) that was recently completed in Culpeper, VA. It will also give an overview of the NAVCC, a state-of-the-art facility for storing and preserving recorded sound, video, and film materials.” The tutorial will take place on October 4, 11:00 am — 12:00 pm

In addition, Chris will be co-chairing the standards committee workgroup on audio metadata and will be working towards the standardization of the emerging audio metadata (SC 03-06)

Chris hopes to have an active and productive conference and looks forward to sharing what he learns from his colleagues.
The link to the 2008 AES Conference Website is here:
http://www.aes.org/events/125/

The Archivists Round Table Of Metropolitan New York (NYART) Is Hosting A Workshop On “Digital Asset Management And Institutional Repositories” On November 10th, 2008

Chris Lacinak, founder of AVPS and Education Coordinator at NYART is pleased to announce an upcoming workshop titled “Digital Asset Management and Institutional Repositories: Case Studies Addressing the Development and Implementation of Systems”, which will be held on November 10th at The NYU Kimmel Center in New York City.

This workshop consists of three presentations from a group of five experts. These presentations will present case studies of projects in which they have been involved. The projects span all relevant content and media types including documents, still images, moving image and sound. The presenters will share their valuable experiences, focusing on covering concerns and questions that many NYART members are, or will soon be asking as they embark on their own projects.

The Speakers will be Leala Abbot – Digital Asset Librarian, Enfatico; Einar Brendalen – Image Systems Analyst, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Jonathan Marmor – Manager of IT and Broadband Operations, Thirteen/WNET New York; David Rice – Digital Media Archivist, Thirteen/WNET New York; and Sunny Yoon – Digital Resources Coordinator, The City University of New York, Office of Library Services.

Development and implementation of these systems is a topic that has been, or will soon be tackled for the first time in many organizations. For those organizations already beyond this initial milestone, the challenge and experience serve as practice while they look forward to repeating the process many more times to come.

AVPS Working In Ghana To Help Save The Country’s Moving Image And Sound Heritiage

Chris Lacinak of AVPS traveled to Ghana for three weeks early this summer as part of the Audiovisual Preservation Exchange (APEX) team. APEX is a recently established effort stemming from NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) Program . The team’s activities were multi–faceted and focused on Ghana’s moving image and sound heritage.

These activities included visiting and interfacing with partner organizations, vendors and technicians to determine current audiovisual preservation capabilities, and to obtain the functional resources needed for local involvement in preservation efforts.

The APEX team met with archives and libraries of cultural institutions located in Accra and Cape Coast, Ghana. These institutions hold rich collections of sound and moving images documenting Ghana’s history. These meetings focused on issues of archiving and preservation while exploring ideas for possible collaborative projects with NYU and MIAP in Ghana.

A considerable amount of Chris Lacinak’s time was spent in supporting Seth Paris, a Fulbright Scholar, who is in Ghana working on preserving the recordings of Ghanaian music legend Kofi Ghanaba (Guy Warren). Chris Lacinak performed an assessment of the audio collection and installed an audio digitization lab at the NYU in Ghana Academic Center. Documentation of preservation workflows, metadata specifications and training materials were also developed in support of the current and ongoing efforts of the audio lab. The lab is capable of preserving content housed on open reel audiotape, audiocassette and analog discs.

The Ghanaba collection serves as a pilot project for the audio digitization lab. The goal is to establish ongoing capability for use as a resource in the preservation of Ghana’s audio heritage.

Digital Asset Management With Free And Open Tools

David Rice and Mike Castleman represented Democracy Now! at the 2008 AMIA Digital Asset Symposium presenting on the integration of open source technology and Free Software in efforts to record, disseminate, and archive moving image media.

The presentation included references to:

• Tools for Recording: dvgrab, cron, vidi
• Tools for Transcoding and Wrapping: ffmpeg, mplayer, MP4Box, ffmpegX, x246 for Quicktime
• Tools for Online Media Accessibility: The Internet Archive, blip.tv, Miro
• Tools for Migrating AudioVisual Data from Tape-Based Digital Media: DATXtract and Live Capture Plus
• Tools for Backup and LTO Management: Bacula
• Metadata Extraction Tools: MediaInfo, getid3, qt_tools
• Metadata Standard: PBCore
• DAS (PDF)

AVPS Moves Office Location To Flatiron/Chelsea, Manhattan

AudioVisual Preservation Solutions has moved its operations to the historic Masonic building on the corner of 6th Avenue and 23rd Street, Manhattan. This move brings us closer to a greater number of our New York clients, and affords us the opportunity to conduct hands-on audiovisual preservation workshops for our clients in an easy to reach location.

While we will miss Williamsburg, Brooklyn, we are pleased to be better situated to serve our clients in the historic Masonic building.

Our new Address is:

AudioVisual Preservation Solutions
71 West 23rd Street
Suite 504
New York, NY 10010

New York Archivist Roundtable Workshop On Moving Image And Sound Preservation

Serving as Education Coordinator for NYART, Chris Lacinak of Audiovisual Preservation Solutions hosted and participated as a speaker in a workshop titled “Preserving Your Moving Image and Sound Collections: An Overview of the Present with a View Toward the Future”.

The workshop featured an array of impressive speakers including Howard Besser, Director of the Moving Image and Preservation Masters Degree Program at NYU; Lee Shoulders, Getty Images; Joshua Ranger, NYU; Tanisha Jones, The New York Library for the Performing Arts, and Peter Kauffman, President of Intelligent TV.

Attending archivists from the New York Metropolitan area represented a wide array of commercial, academic, non-profit, governmental and arts institutions. While some attendees have been working with the preservation of their moving image and sound collections and were seeking to learn new developments in the field, others are just beginning to overcome the unique challenges posed by efforts at preserving dynamic media and content.

The workshop quickly reached maximum capacity early in the enrollment process. Initial feedback provided by the attendees indicates that the event was an overwhelming success.

To see the program for the workshop click the link below.

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