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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.
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.
From Mass Digitization To Mass Description: Indiana University’s Strategy To Overcome The Next Great Challenge
8 June 2015
Over the past decade, much focus has been placed on mass digitization of legacy audiovisual collections. With progress on this front, today there is a new focus emerging: mass description. In 2014 Indiana University (IU) began an effort to digitize hundreds of thousands of hours of audiovisual materials from across campus, leading to the challenge of describing this extraordinarily diverse set of materials both at scale and at a sufficient level of granularity to enable meaningful and effective discovery.
In 2015, with the support of AVP, IU began a strategic planning project to research, analyze and report on technologies, workflows, staffing, timeline and budgets to address this challenge. This presentation, given by Jon Dunn and Chris Lacinak at the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) conference in 2016, delves into the background, goals, approach and next steps for this work.
AVPS Moving to Industry City
26 May 2015
After six-plus years in Midtown Manhattan, AVPS is moving offices to Industry City in Brooklyn. A former manufacturing, storage, and shipping hub located on the Brooklyn waterfront in the Sunset Park neighborhood, Industry City is an exciting new office and light manufacturing development zone that is a growing home to start-ups, restaurants, artists, local crafts and food producers, and many more. We’re very excited to join businesses like MakerBot, Blue Marble Ice Cream, and the Brooklyn Nets in this space primed for innovation and collaboration, two of the hallmarks of what drives the work we do.
Manipulating Data In OpenRefine
27 April 2015
In this tutorial, we explore how to understand and apply features of the OpenRefine (formerly Google Refine) tool in an archival context. OpenRefine can enable organizations to clean up, merge, and manipulate their metadata so that the information can be better integrated into workflows and across systems. OpenRefine is “a free, open source power tool for working with messy data” that libraries, museums, archives, and other organizations can employ to analyze, normalize, and clean up datasets through its simple yet powerful features.
AVPreserve Releases Two Metadata Management Tutorials for Preservation Week 2015
27 April 2015
Pixels, Lines, And Bits: An AV Preservation Primer
16 April 2015
On Thursday, April 16, 2015, Kathryn Gronsbell spoke at the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) in Brooklyn. The event, “PIXELS, LINES, AND BITS: An A/V Preservation Primer for Artists”, was a discussion around personal archiving and preservation approaches for artists interested in stabilizing their work so that it can be available in the short- and long-term.
The presentation and Q+A session was an introduction to concepts like preserving and managing media, how you can leverage your time and money to make more sustainable decisions, and what the benefits might be now and in the future. Thank you to NYFA and Independent Media Arts Preservation for helping organize this event. See NYFA’s Highlight Reel from the discussion.
The Things We Do: This Must Be The Wrong Lock Because I Have The Right Key
19 March 2015
Ah, the question. What do you do? Saying that we do consulting and software development isn’t inaccurate but it never feels adequate either, because it leaves out so much of what is critical about being good at what we do.
