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AVPreserve Seeking Institution for SAA 2014 Service Project

In conjunction with the events around Society of American Archivists 2014 annual meeting in Washington, DC, AVPreserve is planning an archival day of service centered on an audiovisual collection. We are currently seeking an institution with an audio, video, film, or mixed audiovisual collection in need of help, and who will be willing and able to allow 10-20 archival professionals into their facilities to work with the collections. Many a/v collections are severely under-processed, a state that inhibits preservation planning, budgeting, and ability to provide access.

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Chris Lacinak Instructing NEDCC Preservation Workshop

AVPreserve President Chris Lacinak will be in Boston this week to conduct an audiovisual preservation workshop on Friday, April 18th. Sponsored by the Northeast Document Conservation Center, Audiovisual Digitization: Preparing for a Successful Preservation Project will walk participants through the various decision points of developing the specifications for a statement of work (SOW) for a video digitization project. The combination of lecture and hands-on activities will help attendees understand the importance of those specifications, the impact and reasoning behind selecting different specifications, and how a well thought out SOW can help make a preservation project run more smoothly and help an organization achieve their preservation goals. A copy of Chris’ white paper Guide to Developing a Request for Proposal for the Digitization of Video (and More) can be downloaded for free from the avpreserve.com Papers and Presentations page.

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New Paper on Embedded Metadata

Newly available on our Papers and Presentations page is AVPreserve President Chris Lacinak‘s paper Embedded Metadata in WAVE Files: A Look Inside Issues and Tools. Embedded metadata is crucial to managing digital assets, supporting activities as varied as making it easy to find and listen to music in iTunes, authenticating the source and content of a photograph, and performing quality control on content that has been digitized from analog sources. The key duties of an archive — promoting findability, usability, and persistence of collections — would be nearly impossible without embedded metadata.

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New Cloud Storage Vendor Profiles

Following up on our recent white paper Nine Things To Consider When Assessing Cloud Storage, AVPreserve is pleased to announce the release of our first three Cloud Storage Vendor Profiles researched and complied by Consultant Seth Anderson. Part of our Feet on The Ground: A Practical Approach to The Cloud initiative, 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. With many of the preservation decisions to make when dealing with audiovisual and digital media, there are not a lot of cut-and-dried, one-size-fits-all answers. There are options, the selection of which depend greatly on what the goals and capabilities of your organization are, as well as what level of vigilance or of risk you are willing to take on. Our hope is to provide organizations with information that will help them in that decision making process.

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AVPreserve At PBS TechCon 2014

AVPreserve President Chris Lacinak will be speaking at PBS TechCon 2014 taking place April 2nd-4th in Las Vegas, Nevada. The premiere annual gathering on topics related to broadcast technology within in public television, PBS TechCon draws broadcast engineers, information technology and traffic professionals, General Managers, and senior executives representing public media stations from across the globe in order to learn about and discuss new technologies and novel solutions to managing broadcast collections.

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Episode 8 of More Podcast, Less Process Unleashed

Episode #8 of “More Podcast, Less Process”, the archives podcast co-produced by METRO and AVPreserve, is now available for streaming and download. This week’s episode is “The Video Word Made Flesh” with guests Nicole Martin (Multimedia Archivist and Systems Manager, Human Rights Watch), Erik Piil (Digital Archivist, Anthology Film Archives), and Peter Oleksik (Assistant Media Conservator, Museum of Modern Art) discussing the different approaches and challenges of managing video collections for access and preservation. Whether dealing with video in an archival or production environment, there are a number of decision points around digitization, storage, description, and playback, the options for which are highly dependent on the mission and capabilities of the organization. Josh & Jefferson and their guests talk about these issues and all things video. It’s a visual treat for your ears.

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New Digital Preservation Services From AVPreserve

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AVPreserve At Code4Lib

AVPreserve Senior Consultant Kara Van Malssen will be attending the Code4Lib conference this week in Raleigh, North Carolina. We have long followed the work that comes out of the Code4Lib community and strive to follow a similar ethos of innovation, openness, and collaboration in achieving technological solutions for the challenges of digital preservation and access. We’re excited to be attending the conference for the first time and look forward to learning and sharing. If you’re in Raleigh, stop and chat with Kara about the projects we’re working on — just don’t mention Date and Time formatting…

New Catalyst Case Studies in Audiovisual Preservation

What happens to a collection when its sole caretaker is suddenly out of the picture and has left no documentation? This is an all too common occurrence with archival collections, and the problem is compounded with audiovisual collections where content may not be accessible and identifiable, production practices may create multiple versions or derivatives, and preservation or reformatting is often a necessary first step before anything else.

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AVPreserve at New England Archivists Spring Meeting

AVPreserve is proud to participating at the New England Archivists Annual Meeting taking place March 20th-22nd in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. AVPreserve President Chris Lacinak will be presenting on two separate panels. First, Chris will join Yvonne Ng (Archivist, WITNESS) and Jane Mandelbaum (IT Project Manager at Library of Congress) on the Free Open Source Tools panel where he will speak about Fixity, MDQC, Interstitial, and AVCC, four free digital preservation applications that AVPreserve has released in the past year. On Saturday Chris will be speaking with Elizabeth Walters (Program Officer for Audiovisual Materials, Weissman Preservation Center, Harvard Library) on The End of Analog Audiovisual Media: The cost of inaction & what you can do about it. He will discuss our new Cost of Inaction Calculator — a tool that helps archives quantify and effectively articulate what is lost in the way of access, intellect and finances by not acting to reformat collections — and our Catalyst inventory tool which was used to help the New Jersey Network efficiently create an item level inventory of 100,000 audiovisual items so they could begin to prioritize and plan for preservation.

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