Ignite
Exactly Where We Are
25 July 2017
Exactly, a friendly desktop application for creating BagIt-compliant digital packages, is almost 1.5 years old now. Hatched as an idea for allowing oral historians to submit born-digital interviews directly to recipient archives with baked-in, preservation-minded features (e.g., file inventories, checksums, package metadata, producer-archive communication), Exactly is now in wide use across multiple continents, and is supported in digital preservation workflows by a variety of systems and services, including Archivematica and Arkivum. With this wide use, Exactly’s functionalities have been extended to include digital forensics use cases (e.g., an original file system metadata report) and enhanced security features (e.g., support for SFTP delivery).
AVCC Updates Being Rolled Out in the Coming Week
16 June 2017
We are excited to announce a number of new updates to AVCC thanks to major support from Harvard Business School! Here is what will be rolled out in the coming week.
The Workflow Show #203 “Beyond Metadata: The Role Of Audio And Video Search”
5 May 2017
AVP President Chris Lacinak is a featured speaker in this Chesapeake Systems Podcast discussing video metadata workflows and two powerful new search applications, Nexidia and NerVve. Nexidia is a phonetic search application that can scan a library of literally thousands of hours of footage in seconds. NerVve is an application that works similarly with video imagery search. Both applications present easy-to-use interfaces, and the results typically “blow-away” first-time users.
Joined by representatives from each company, the panelists address the questions of what role these applications play in advanced video workflows and whether they threaten or complement metadata-driven media asset management systems?
Audiovisual Metadata Platform (AMP) Large-Scale Tool
5 May 2017
Indiana University, UT Austin, and AVP were awarded a Mellon planning grant in 2017 —called “Audiovisual Metadata Platform” (AMP)—to continue investigating large scale metadata generation of audiovisual materials. This presentation given at the Digital Library Federation conference in 2017 reports on the outcomes of an in-person meeting of archivists and technical experts who gathered as part of the grant for a three day workshop focused on AMP’s technical architecture and design.
AUDIOVISUAL METADATA PLATFORM (PDF)
Fourth Annual AV Archives Night Spotlights Social Justice
28 February 2017
AV Archives Night has become an evening of entertainment and awareness each year at the Society of American Archivists’ Annual Meeting. This year—our fourth—AVPreserve will again co-sponsor the evening with the Association of Moving Image Archivists.
AVP Webinar Series: Fixity
8 February 2017
This is the recording of an AVP webinar given on the topic of the Fixity application by Amy Rudersdorf on February 8th, 2017.
Webinar description: How do you know if your digital files are corrupt, missing, moved or renamed? We invite you to join us to learn how Fixity will allow you to monitor and report on file integrity and attendance. How does it work? Fixity scans a folder or directory, creating a manifest of the files including their file paths and their checksums, against which regular comparative analyses are performed. Fixity then emails a report to the user documenting flagged items along with the reason for a flag, such as that a file has been moved to a new location in the directory, has been edited, or has failed a checksum comparison for other reasons. When run regularly, Fixity becomes a powerful tool for monitoring digital files in almost any storage location.
AVPreserve on Freakonomics Podcast
27 January 2017
Over the summer, Chris met with Stephen J. Dubner to discuss what we do for collection assessments. Portions of this conversation became a part of the October 19, 2016 episode of Dubner’s Freakonomics Radio podcast. The episode, titled “In Praise of Maintenance,” explores issues surrounding our culture’s preoccupation with innovation at the cost of maintenance. We couldn’t be more excited to be a guest on one of our favorite podcasts and this episode (and the one that follows) are both so relevant to the work that we and our colleagues do. Take a listen here!
Cloud Storage Vendor Profiles
26 January 2017
Part of our Feet on The Ground: A Practical Approach to The Cloud series, 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.
AVP Webinar Series: Exactly
20 January 2017
This is the recording of an AVP webinar given on the topic of our Exactly tool by Chris Lacinak on January 19th, 2017.
Webinar description: For organizations challenged by remotely and safely transferring born-digital material from a sender to a recipient, we invite you to join our workshop on Exactly. A simple and easy to use application that utilizes the BagIt File Packaging Format standard, Exactly supports FTP (and SFTP) transfer, as well as standard network transfers, and integrates into desktop-based file sharing workflows such as Dropbox or Google Drive. Additionally, Exactly allows the recipient to create customized metadata templates for the sender to fill out before submission.
About Us
12 January 2017
Over the past months we have held a series of all-team meetings to take stock and revisit the fundamentals of AVP: who we are, what we do, and why we do it. An outcome of this is a series of statements that serve as a reference and reminder to ourselves as we move through busy days and the weeks fly by. We consider them something we can turn to as a guide for clarity, principled decision making and action. While our focus was initially internal, we have come to believe that it is important to make these explicit declarations accessible externally so that others who are not familiar with AVP and our culture gain insight into us as individuals and a company. We’re working on a re-design of our website this year, and eventually this will have its own section there, but for now we wanted to share it with you in some form.
