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Enough With The Vinyl Already

Unlike other dead media, the vinyl LP refuses to fade away, as the story of the vinyl revival assures us. Starting (at my first notice) in Slate and ping-ponging across the pond via Twitter (oh wait, or was that 2007?), the tale has ended up back stateside again on the editorial page of the New York Times. There the story was anew, this time paired with a similar short blurb comparing the use of ebooks and physical books (spoiler alert!: ebooks think they’re all that, but they’re not!).

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Data Is A Simple Machine

This post is a (I hope) friendly argument response to (or perhaps more a restatement of position regarding) Megan McShea’s response to a prior blog of mine posted on archivesnext.com regarding the use and effectiveness of EAD. I love what Megan wrote, but as the Al Chet prayer of Yom Kippur denotes, there are many sins of pride and stiff-neckedness that push one to respond in such situations.

*****

I had all four of my wisdom teeth extracted in one fell swoop when I was 19. My dentist assured me I could get through it without going under — just Novocain (and maybe a valium to calm the nerves). Dr. Payne — no joke — said he could just numb up my mouth, have at the offending teeth, and send me on my merry way without the need to recover from anesthesia. I was 19 and interested in saving money on the whole procedure, so I went along with his plan. I mean, really, why would Dr. Payne steer me wrong?

I reckon the whole thing wasn’t all that bad — he used a lot of Novocain — but I distinctly recall the odd sensation of mentally feeling teeth being pulled out of my head but not physically feeling it. Something to make me go “hmmm” while also needing to strongly hold back the urge to stop what was happening and/or gag.

I also recall the point at which I realized Dr. Payne was repurposing my forehead as a fulcrum, using the leverage of his arm against my skull to help work the teeth out. Yes, I thought, my head is a simple machine.

*****

This is still the case.

*****

Megan, I appreciate your thoughtful and extensive response to — or smackdown of — my blog post on EAD. If I had thought anyone would read and respond to my blogs I might’ve changed my mind about posting them! Really though, I think your point of view as a practitioner in an archive is valuable in opposition to mine as a consultant. The organizational and resource realities of archives are always foremost in my mind in my work as I try to find the point where the ideal, the possible, and the practical can meet and shake hands. I think the policies and processes the AAA has in place are at the high end of the curve on that graph, and it’s not easy to argue against your points because, well, you’re right.

But I still think you’re wrong.

I agree that, at the base of it, we’re talking across communities of practice. I deal with many broadcast or production centric collections, which produce a specific set of asset types and present use cases that may be less researcher focused than academic or research archives. A finding aid is fairly useless in this situation because it is not specific enough to identify and locate the correct item amidst what may be multiple versions, instantiations, and fragments — the same way one would need to be able to discern among manuscripts and various print editions (perhaps with major revisions or printing errors) of written material.

But I also think that all collections are now mixed collections (as all archivists are digital archivists) and it’s making less sense to make such distinctions. Also, many of those production-based collections eventually end up in traditional or institutional archives because it was produced internally by the organization or, at some point, the television station or documentarian or radio producer ends up donating their materials somewhere. That results in the ingest of boxes and boxes of (for example) camera originals, U-matic or Betacam film transfers, rough cuts, alternate audio mixes, masters, viewing copies on VHS or DVD, and perhaps some commercial distribution copies. As in the production environment, item level processing is really the only way to tell what’s what and find the right pieces to preserve or transfer for access.

Again, yes, a case that does not apply across the board if a collection is primarily published releases or one-off recordings, but with unique recordings I do see more frequently than not either materials that are not annotated well enough (if at all) to be able to identify them, or even the well-annotated materials that get stuck in the backlog and are never moved into the preservation queue because they are undescribed or unreckoned with.

And that really gets to the crux of my concern: whether dealing with a media-specific collection or mixed collection, audiovisual (and all digital) media needs to be made accessible either through reformatting or through the acquisition of proper playback equipment. Equally so, whether dealing with a media-specific collection or mixed collection, audiovisual (and all digital) media that is considered of lasting value needs to be preserved through reformatting or migration at some point in its lifecycle.

In dealing with magnetic media and certain other physical formats, the deadline for that reformatting is sooner than later. If you are not performing the activities that move those materials into a preservation queue and reformat them in the next 10-15 years, you are essentially discarding them. EAD does not achieve this level of need. In my view the reliance on EAD has resulted in it becoming an endpoint or cul de sac, not a pivot point — a situation much research is going into to try and dig out of in order to take advantage of how data is used today.

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Now I totally understand researcher driven preservation. When resources are limited, of course it makes sense to funnel them where it best supports the institutional mission. Though I know it happens I seldom see the individual items make it into MARC catalogs (notable exceptions, such as a number of research collections at NYPL). Description via EAD is of course considered a driver of that process by making collections more findable and promoting researcher request. I see a few problems here.

– Poorly annotated items can only be described at the collection name level with little clue as to actual content. Even if a minimal finding aid at the collection level is created, it will not necessarily give a clue to the contents. If we were looking for some rare Doris Wishman outtakes, without extra information would we necessarily know that the Mike Vraney Collection may contain them? Or that there may be home movie footage of a historical event mixed in with the primary type of content in such a collection if I do know the general scope?

– Just because someone is researching a topic does not make it of significant historical value. It may just be as equally an esoteric one-off or a wrong turn down a blind alley. That’s fine if materials are already accessible, but problematic if resources must first go to reformatting.

– Not all collections are research collections, and even in research collections the use cases for search and potential users may rely more on keywords, time-based metadata, transcripts, dates, etc.

– We simply don’t have that long to wait around.

Cumulatively these factors make the reactive position untenable. Of course we cannot (nor should not) preserve everything, but with the volume, time constraints, and severe findability/access issues with audiovisual and digital materials, we are at risk of slashing and burning much more than we need to or mean to.

*****

One of my regrets prior to and after posting about EAD was that the post didn’t quite express what was my original thought — not that EAD should be completely jettisoned, but that data collection should be granular and flexible. EAD has its place and its uses, but I often get the sense of a hyper focus on generating EAD that comes at the expense of collecting data in a way that would support finding aids as well as the other activities that support collection management. The dataset generated should be eminently deployable in its fundamental form. The information should be in a holding ground of sorts where an EAD finding aid, a MARC record, a viewer/media player, or some other online portal pulls the data it needs and maps it per its use in that form.

Despite the frothy mouthed proclamations over Big Data or the mystical gurus of data like Nate Silver and the Obama reelection campaign, data is a simple machine. It is nothing more than chunks of information (or more often, per the axiom, chunks of garbage) of varying length, moving in and out of systems. The complexities of data are merely a result of the Rube Goldbergian structure of schemas or relational tables — fragile systems of levers and pulleys performing various tasks — or a result of garbage-y, uncontrolled data.

If data is collected in a manner or form that privileges the endpoint (as opposed to a step or a goal stage), we risk getting stuck in that endpoint. I appreciate that EAD is an open standard and the XML structure allows portability, and the projects you list out are great examples of that use. But I also know a number of developers who hate working with it and have been stymied in creating automated upload/mapping utilities for EAD because the application of the standard is frequently idiosyncratic. Also, when dealing with audiovisual and digital media technical and process metadata is integral to collection management. Description is just one piece of supporting archival services.

In short, yes there are people mapping data out of EAD, but in my opinion we need to flip things and not just try to find solutions for porting out of EAD because that’s what we’re stuck in, but rather use EAD as something that is ported into as just one option for archival activities.

When MARC goes away, it’s going to be incredibly messy, both from the data migration standpoint and the resistance standpoint. And EAD will go away, too. First, because at some point you cannot keep revising a data structure to new media, new situations, and new technology without it eventually falling apart. At some point things need to be scrapped and begun anew. Second, because things go away. It is the nature of life and, therefore, of archives.

— Joshua Ranger

AVPreserve Welcomes Bertram Lyons

AVPreserve is very pleased to welcome Bertram Lyons, the newest member of our growing team. Bert joins us from Library of Congress American Folklife Center where he helps develop tools, policies, and partnerships around the development and management of digital collections. During his tenure the AFC has become a leader in digital preservation at the Library of Congress, having built their collection to over 500,000 digital objects and integrated their analog and born digital acquisition and processing work flows into a seamless process. Bert will continue work with the AFC as he begins a consulting role with AVPreserve.

Prior to the Library of Congress Bert was Archivist and Collection Manager for the Alan Lomax Archive, one of the most significant collections of field recordings in 20th century history. A subject specialist in folklife collections, oral histories, and field and musical recordings, Bert has deep experience in all aspects of managing such collections, from the digitization of legacy materials, description, schema and database development, and accessioning/processing. He is active nationally and internationally with professional archival organizations such as the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (Member of the Executive Board and Editor of IASA publications) the Society of American Archivists (Chair of the Career Development Subcommittee and Vice-chair of the Oral History Section), the Association of Recorded Sound Collections, and the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA), and he has also received certification from the Academy of Certified Archivists and is a recent graduate of the Archives Leadership Institute.

We’re very excited to have Bert joining us and adding his expertise to what we can offer, and we are excited about the new collaborations and learning opportunities he will bring to our crew. AVPreserve has expanded a lot in the past year, and we look forward to continuing that growth and always improving our abilities in serving our community in the new year.

Quantifying The Need: A Survey Of Existing Sound Recordings In Collections In The United States

In 2014, AVP and the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC), with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, undertook an in-depth, multi-faceted assessment to quantify the existing audio items held in institutional collections throughout the United States. This was performed in response to The Library of Congress National Recording Preservation Plan and its call for the appraisal of collections, as well as to establish a foundation for articulating the current preservation need of sound recordings in collections nationwide.

Our goal was to acquire enough trustworthy data to be able to answer questions such as “How many sound recordings exist in broadcast organizations across the US?” or “How many sound recordings exist in archives throughout the US?” Moreover, we wanted to answer more complex questions such as “How many of such items are preservation-worthy?” or “How many have already been digitized?” Prioritization for digitization is as critical as both funding and timeliness. The foundation for action on all three of these fronts is trustworthy quantitative data. This paper aims to provide such data along with supporting information about the methodologies used in its generation.

• QUANTIFYING THE NEED (PDF)

More Podcast, Less Process Holiday Edition

Episode 5 (née 4.5) of More Podcast, Less Process, the archives podcast, has been released. “Year End Wrap Up — The Archivist Says…” is a special holiday edition of the podcast, collecting brief interviews with real live archivists recorded at the 2013 New York Archivists Round Table Awards Ceremony and the 2013 Association of Moving Image Archivists annual conference. Josh (and guest interviewer Seth Anderson) go on location with hard hitting questions such as “What is your name?” and “What’s the most awesomest thing in your collection?” Enjoy the pre-holiday cheer as part of your holidays, but enjoy responsibly.

As always, you can listen through iTunes, Soundcloud, and Internet Archive; find information and direct downloads on the More Podcast, Less Process page at keepingcollections. org, or follow our RSS feed at http://morepodcast.libsyn.com/rss.

AVPreserve Releases New Metadata Web Tutorial

In the digital realm, metadata is not just the key to discovery and retrieval as it is with analog materials, but it is also a critical component to collection management and all aspects of preservation. This is especially true with the technical and administrative metadata embedded in files which tell us the exact specs of the file and can give a clue to provenance and other information that establishes the authenticity and quality of the file. The ability to read, write, and track this embedded metadata is a standard activity of digital preservation, and utilities such as MediaInfo and Exiftool form the basis of many workflows and tools used in file creation and monitoring.

To help people understand how to use such digital preservation mainstays, AVPreserve has begun to record a series of tutorials walking through how the tools work and through real use cases for the utilities. We have just released our first series on the use of Exiftool conducted by Consultant Kathryn Gronsbell. The four videos and other resources can be found on our website here and through our Papers page. Happy embedding!

AVPreserve Welcomes Rebecca Chandler

AVPreserve is pleased to welcome Rebecca Chandler to our growing team. Rebecca holds a BM in Music Technology from NYU, and after establishing a distinguished professional career as an audio engineer with companies such as Broadway Video and Sony Music Studios, she earned her MLIS with an Archives certificate from Pratt Institute. Her primary focus with AVPreserve will center around providing analysis and recommendations regarding the digitization of legacy media — including workflows, equipment, infrastructure, and staffing — as well as work in the area of collection assessments. Since our founding AVPreserve has prioritized the importance of hands-on, real world technical experience converging with archival practice as part of the service we offer and the knowledge we share with our partners. We’re excited to be bringing someone with Rebecca’s skills and experience on board and look forward to continuing this tradition. Welcome, Rebecca!

American Archive Announces New Home

The American Archive of Public Broadcasting — an unprecedented collection of 40,000 hours of content produced across the nation on public television and public radio — has announced its new home under a collaboration between The Library of Congress and WGBH in Boston. After a multi-year process that began with an inventory of over 120 Public Broadcasting stations and is now in the midst of digitizing select materials from those stations, the management of the Archive and its eventual public access component is transferring from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to LOC and WGBH.

AVPreserve is proud to have participated in various aspects of the American Archive’s development from early on, including assistance in strategic planning, revision of the PBCore metadata schema in use by the Archive, and conducting station inventories in Rochester, NY and Trenton, NJ. Over the past year we have developed the AMS content management system which has been used to centralize all inventory records, manage the digitization workflow between individual stations and Crawford Media Services, and provide online access to digitized content for the stations. We will continue to maintain this system and assist in the transfer of data and content to the new home.

This has been a massive, exciting project with no real model to follow for achieving something so large and complex. All the people who have been involved along the way helped overcome significant challenges. It was inspiring to work with them, and is very satisfying to see the American Archive come to this point where such amazing content will be made available to the public again.

Why Do We Look Past The Complexities – And Shortcomings – Of Film?

Media preservation is an imperfect art. In the end, it is about maintaining a faithfulness to the original image/signal/presentation, within the confines of what is possible as impacted by condition of the original, existing technology, desired use, and (shhh) budget. There are options for reformatting both technological (what machinery, stocks, and other equipment is used) and artistic (color-timing, levels, stylus selection) which affect the end product, for better or for worse.

Media preservation is an impermanent art. In the end, our efforts, too, will fade away and require further effort. And our decisions will impact the options of those who follow us, for better or for worse.

***

In making preservation decision we must be aware of our own interpretive limitations, as well as the technological limitation of the media we are working with. There is no perfect medium, and anyone trying to sell you on that is…trying to sell you something. Caveat emptor. Cavete a mediorum.

When dealing with target digital formats we try to make these caveats transparent to aid decision making — such factors as looking at how proprietary something is, how tied it is to particular systems, or how complex and processor heavy it is. A certain format may offer benefits such as smaller sizes or improved visual quality, but those may be outweighed by usability and portability concerns that negatively impact collection management. These facts do not instantly disqualify all digital formats for preservation use, but they should influence one’s decision on which format to select.

We could do that same exercise with videotape, but the caveat there is, basically, that that’s an insane option.

But really what got me thinking on this topic is what I call the storage caveat. Film still is certainly a valid preservation format for film. There are definitely benefits of quality, presentation, and stability that film provides. But the pea that gets under my mattress is the small print of “under the right storage conditions”, as in film is stable for X gagillion years ^{under the right storage conditions}.

What are these right storage conditions? Pretty much cold and frozen (14℉-45℉), with limited seasonal fluctuation. Never mind the physical space and shelving required for storage of film reels. How many institutions can actually maintain such environmental conditions reliably? Especially considering that most collections will be mixed with video, audio, photography, and paper, as well as the fact that many institutions are experimenting with shutting down HVAC systems overnight to save on electricity costs? Space wise, cost wise, and environmentally wise film cannot be a one-size-fits-all solution — as I have seen it pushed through certain venues or grant programs — nor is it necessarily the right solution for film. It is an option.

Another caveat that came to me while thinking about this is the fallacy of physicality. One of the arguments for the primacy of film is the idea that, even if the technology is gone, you can still pick up a film and view it by eye with out a projector. Yes, but what about the audio track? Can you read a magnetic stripe or optical track with your eyes? Can you really understand a film without the audio? Sure, maybe if it’s silent, but even then there are interstitials or accompanying lectures (or informal narration as with home movies) which give explanation or context to the image. Why would the audio piece be ignored in such a scenario? Are we willing to forgo it? (I know if it were full coat mag track I would like very much to forget it and not deal with it…) Is that really an argument for preservation if such reasoning contains the purposeful future fragmentation and decontextualization?

***

In truth, like file-based works, film is a complex format that extends well beyond image, emulsion, and base. The work itself may exist in multiple pieces and components — that may or may not be film — which are connected merely through labeling or metadata or, perhaps, physical proximity…Or not at all. The persistence of the physical reel is not preservation of the cinematic experience nor preservation of the entire work, nor is that physical persistence guaranteed.

The caveat, no, the fact of media preservation is that migration is the only long term solution and that all formats will degrade or obsolesce much sooner than we anticipated. Art imitates life.

Life is a caveat, old chum.

— Joshua Ranger

Why Do We Allow Our Infrastructure To Decay?

Not all history is recorded in writing or sound or images, but it exists in the world to be read and interpreted. This history of a city is written in its infrastructure and design, a mingling of the co-existant far ago and recent memory. Documentation such as photographs and oral histories and objects help relate that history when it has been erased from the landscape, but such mediums cannot capture the living history and emotional essence of epochal juxtapositions experienced in real time.

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I love train travel and visting new cities for the ability they provide to traverse areas outside the city center (at early hours before the city awakes) and read new histories. To see where industry happens or happened, where city services park their vehicles or where long haul truckers park overnight, where development is blossoming or where it occurred and has faded, where people live or where they used to live or where they would never ever ever live.

A city’s history is a story of planned and unplanned growth, of desires achieved and unrealized, of dreams and crushing reality.

A city’s history is written in the brick and steel and asphalt and paint of these fluctuations. Growth and decay. Growth and decay. Growth and decay. And, finally, decay.

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Decay, as with everything, is what infrastructure does. The urge to rebuild, of course, has its economic sources, but ultimately it is the impulse of social good. To revive an area, make it more livable or visitable, to improve public safety, to increase local pride, and to support the development of society and culture.

There may be economic impact from these things, such as jobs and tourism and real estate, but malls and industrial parks can bring that, too, without the positive impacts on health and community. We have the responsibility to invest in our infrastructure — outside of cities and in — for the good of society. This includes new development, maintenance, and rebuilding. The economic impacts we tend to focus on will follow, in ways we were unlikely to anticipate. But really, how does revenue compare to a child in Montana visiting a Smithsonian museum online, or the ability to walk safely outside and visit a nearby park, or bridges not collapsing on us?

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Archives are part of the infrastructure of history and culture. Like our physical infrastructure, they require continued maintenance and development to persist and remain viable. And as with our physical infrastructure, this work has massively overwhelming amounts of backlogs and incoming new work…and is massively underfunded and under appreciated.

But where this parallel is strongest is in the vital importance of each to the health and growth of our society. Underscoring this recently was the study — filed under “Well, duh.” — finding that reading literary fiction makes us more empathetic and increases our social perception and emotional intelligence. This improves our social interactions and ability to relate to and care about others, which ultimately supports the social good.

The material found in archives has the potential to expand on this by engaging the public with the history and thoughts of individuals, groups, and locations. Opening us to what has come before, thus helping us understand that something comes after us. Connecting us to stories and ideas that exist outside our own ideologies, our own little neighborhood, our own present concerns that fail to recognize the impact our decisions have on others and the impact that others can have on us.

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Archives are in a special position to do more than provide content for esoteric research or YouTube mashups. Archives have the opportunity to impact society in a positive way by providing insight and understanding, by keeping the memory and culture of a community alive for the benefit of that community and others, by showing us where we have succeeded and where we have failed in order to strive to be better.

As an archivist I feel we have a deep responsibility to serve in that way. That means there’s a lot of heavy lifting to be done to overcome the backlogs and challenges and crumbling infrastructure, work that needs to be done soon before we start losing too much of our past. It’s going to be hard, but it matters. It matters because history and culture make us care so we don’t recklessly destroy what we have built, and care so that we make what we have built better.

— Joshua Ranger

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