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Kara Van Malssen Invited To Speak At Opening Plenary Of AMIA 2012

AVPS Senior Consultant Kara Van Malssen and AVPS President Chris Lacinak have been invited to address the Association of Moving Image Archivists’ community as a speaker at the Opening Plenary of the 2012 annual conference in Seattle, WA. As part of the Conference Welcome, the plenary will take place this Wednesday, December 5th following the annual awards ceremony. Chris and Kara will be speaking about collaborative efforts to help flooded media collections during the recent Hurricane Sandy disaster, including the work AVPS, Erik Piil, NYU MIAP and other volunteers did to help salvage the flooded collection at Eyebeam Art & Technology Gallery. Be sure to check out the reception and talk, and look for Chris and Kara at the conference if you’re there!

Disaster Response Information & Assistance

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy we compiled a list of disaster response resources such as guidelines, advisory services, relief grant opportunities, and aggregate sites, especially focusing on resources related to audiovisual assets. These resources are pertinent to any type of disaster, not just hurricanes and floods. In our experience implementing such efforts to assist people affected by the flooding, the fact was heavily underscored that an emergency preparedness plan alleviates much of the stress and uncertainty.

We were overwhelmed by the response we saw throughout the archiving and arts community, from volunteers, and from those outside the region lending their support and spreading advice through social media. Twitter, you’re all right.

*Audiovisual Specific*
Association of Moving Image Archivists: Disaster – First Actions: First Actions for Film, Tape and Discs
National Film & Sound Archive Australia: First aid for water damage
Washing and Handling Wet Film (video demonstration): http://www.folkstreams.net/vafp/clip.php?id=63
Disaster Recovery for Films in Flooded Areas by Mick Newnham
Specs Bros Hurricane and Flood Recovery Info for Video and Audiotape http://www.specsbros.com/hflood_recover.htm
And Disaster Recovery Checklist: http://www.specsbros.com/recover.html

National Park Service Conserv-O-Gram Salvage of Water Damaged Collections: Paper, Non-Paper Based, Objects, Natural History, Textiles
National Film & Sound Archive Australia Disaster Planning : http://www.nfsa.gov.au/preservation/handbook/disaster-planning/
*Direct Response & Support*
Northeast Document Conservation Center 24 hour Disaster Assistance Hotline: (978) 470-1010
American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works Disaster Response & Recovery Hotline: (202) 661-8068
And the website: http://www.conservation-us.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Page.viewPage&pageId=695
Lyrasis Disaster Assistance:
Phone – (800) 999-8558
Email – [email protected]
Website – Disaster Assistance
Mid-Atlantic Region Archives Conference Disaster Relief Fund: http://www.marac.info/disaster-relief–
SAA National Disaster Recovery Fund for Archives: http://www2.archivists.org/news/2008/national-disaster-recovery-fund-for-archives
New York State Archives Disaster Assistance: http://www.archives.nysed.gov/a/records/mr_disaster.shtml
*Multi-topic & Aggregated Resources*
Preservation Response & Recovery Resources from Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov/preservation/emergprep/recovery.html
NARA Records Emergency Information : http://www.archives.gov/preservation/records-emergency/
METRO Disaster Recovery Resources List : http://metro.org/articles/disaster-recovery-resources/

Is It Wrong To Focus On Saving Mere Things After A Disaster?

One of the great conflicts I have with the choice of my career is the primary focus on material objects, on plastic things. Sure, those things hold important cultural content, but int he end they (generally) are not a matter of life or death. They are not people who are suffering, who could use the resources and care we give to these piles of…stuff.

One makes one’s choices in life, and, realistically, most work is not immediately critical to survival. But this issue I have is brought into sharp relief at times like these as we recover from Hurricane Sandy. I’m very proud of the work we at AVPS and all the other volunteers have done at Eyebeam Art & Technology Center and with other media collections to help salvage their materials. (See our Facebook page for photos and documentation of the effort.) The mobilization effort is so impressive, and seeing our colleagues in the field use their expertise and passion to save a collections before it is completely (and quickly) lost is just, wow.

But at the same time, one wonders (or maybe just I do), what if we had funneled just a fragment of that effort into taking food and equipment to people in the hard hit areas like the Rockaways and Staten Island, or into volunteering at medical shelters to care for the sick and elderly, or going into houses to help clean up and rebuild? What are mounds of DVDs and reels of magnetic tape compared to the life of a stranded shut in who needs warm clothes and a hot meal, or someone who has lost their home?

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In a less drastic scenario, this kind of question parallels the issue of general funding for the arts, libraries and archives, and preservation. However in that arena I have no problem adamantly averring that yes, these institutions and efforts need more resources and money because they matter. Arts and Humanistic learning bring texture and richness to our lives. They connect us to others, in the present, past, and (if we’re lucky) the future. We understand the things that make life physically possible to live — food, water, shelter, clothing — but what is that capability without the things that make life worth living — family, community, belief (in something or nothing), pleasurable food and drink, entertainment, and art.

And in the aftermath of tragedy — the brunt of which many of us were lucky enough to escape relatively unscathed — it is also important to recall the importance of quality of life, as well as to understand our roles and abilities to contribute as part of a functioning, livable society. We do what we can and we help in the ways that other people cannot help themselves.

In this way the kind of work done at Eyebeam is not about material stuff. It’s about community, about reaching out to someone to say what you do or what you care about matters to others. It makes our lives better. We want to help maintain that fact and share it with others, and we want to thank you.

— Joshua Ranger

Can Better Metadata Help Better Manage Costs And Disaster Recovery

Based primarily (I myself believe) on my sterling undergrad honors thesis on the topic of African-American Women’s 19th Century Spiritual Personal Narratives, I was able to procure a temporary staffing position as a file clerk with a workers compensation and general liability insurance company.

Don’t let anyone tell you that a Humanities degree is not versatile.

I ended up staying on, working in several different positions until I careened myself into the data analysis and reporting side of things. Much of the work was basic number crunching — how many claims, frequencies, how much was being spent — but an actually interesting part of the job was developing reports that would be the basis of risk management studies, such as looking at injury types across periods, locations, or jobs to see if there may be some preventable cause. Sure, maybe in the end it was ultimately about saving money, but I preferred to think about the efforts as trying to ensure that workers were not put in harmful or injurious conditions in order to create a safer, more pleasant workplace.

Don’t let anyone tell you that a cynic with a Humanities degree is not actually a big idealistic slob.

Another interesting thing I learned on the job was the different types of medical care models — such as preventative, curative, and palliative — and how they were applied on a health care continuum. In truth, though I may joke about that period in my life because one is supposed to joke about working in insurance, I picked up a lot in that career that has shaped how I think about preservation and collection management as, in a way, risk management or risk reduction. Essentially, we know that the assets are decaying, becoming obsolete, or can get damaged, so we work in ways at various points in the item’s lifecycle to prevent (for a time), retard, or ameliorate those events.

This is on my mind right now because we’re all waiting to hear what the impact of Hurricane Sandy on library, archive, museum, and other collections will end up being — not to mention the many personal collections endangered that we will probably not hear as much about but should still be a concern. We’re all bracing for what could be a high degree of palliative or curative care to salvage collections.

In an event like this it is uncertain precisely how much impact preventative care had. Yes, there are certain things which help, but water and wind do what they want. This is the bind of preventative measures (or insurance for that matter) — you don’t really know how beneficial (or useless) it may be until a triggering event occurs, or such an event may never occur, so there’s always the gamble to do without just to save costs.

Maybe we need another term that’s something more like Preparative — making sure that in the event of a disaster you are prepared to respond to it and have done things to prepare for smoothly managing the recovery. Many of these things would be covered in a disaster preparedness plan, such as having a phone tree and proper equipment and guidelines for recovering materials, but based on some of my experiences I feel there is one thing we are not focusing enough efforts on that would help us be more prepared — the creation of centralized, analyzable asset records at or near item-level.

How can this help? I’ve written a white paper on the topic posted today in our Papers & Presentations section, (“Insuring Media Archives & Leveraging Data Management as a Risk Reduction Solution”). Essentially, my thesis is that if you can’t quantify your collection pre-disaster, it will be impossible to do so afterwards, leading to an increased potential for a contentious claims process, duplicative or inefficient remediation efforts that waste resources, and greater costs down the road for coverage or self-funded remediation. Pre-disaster, a poorly quantified collection may result in over or under coverage, or a lack of realization regarding potential strategies for reducing risk to the most valuable content in a collection. This last point is very important to audiovisual and photographic collections where there is frequent duplication or versioning of contents, and management efforts should be focused on original or highest quality items.

Processing backlogs, incomplete records, or dis-aggregated records sets are a frequent issue for institutions, and the resources to alleviate those problems are often lacking. In reality, fuller records can impact many other cost points, such as the insurance topic discussed in my paper, time spent assisting patrons in discovery, or legal issues that require the recovery and review of data. Not to ignore the recovery efforts that are on-going and will continue, but for institutions not affected by Sandy or who escaped catastrophe, these events should be an eye-opener to the potential for risk. We need to start weighing these factors or risk, cost, and benefit and use them as arguments for improved funding for record creation, record management systems, and other data-centric areas that impact how well we can do our work and protect our collections.

— Joshua Ranger

Benign Neglect Is Not A Preservation Strategy

I rarely rewatch movies or reread books. My urge when given a choice is to opt for something new to me. I know some would say I’m missing out on uncovering new layers or new understandings of a “text”, but I suppose any anxiety coming out of the thought that I many suddenly be cornered into a conversation about the referential hermeneutics of De Palma’s mid-career oeuvre is lesser than the anxiety over the fact that there’s a whole mess of stuff out there to wade through in a limited amount of time.

Another anxiety I have is that upon rereading/rewatching something, I just won’t feel the same passion or interest as I did the first time. The humor won’t tickle as much, the thrills won’t be as knuckle bleaching, and the drama will be more mellow than Melo-. Not only would it sadden me to piddle away two hours on lukewarm enjoyment, but it would also sadden me to have my pleasant memories decayed much more quickly than is already happening by the ravages of time and whiskey.

It sounds silly, but I don’t think it’s that odd of a fear. It certainly has happened to me (and I assume others) before. At one level I’ve often read film critics talk about reassessing a film outside of the initial context/emotion of a film festival setting. On a personal level I’ve made a number of attempts to revisit works I passionately adored in high school and have been left rather flat. That being the case one has to recognize that tastes shift with age and awareness, and adolescence, with its high emotions, bitter dislike of hypocrisy, and obsession with defining the self, is well fed by the Orwells, the Rands, and the Thoreaus with their stark, unyielding philosophies and allegories of struggling against the masses.

You have to figure that teachers love having Orwell, Rand, et al at hand because their styles do appeal to students, but also because the literary starkness does lend itself to use (and instruction) of tropes in a way that sticks up out of the ground for readers to trip over: Allegory, irony, paradox, hyperbole, satire, oxymoron…

Oxymoron. That was our favorite. One, it sounded funny. Two, it was great nerd humor (Pretty ugly. Bwaa haa haa! Business ethics. Bwaa haa haa! Military intelligence. Bwaa haa haa!). Three, it was a tool for us to see through what the Man was pushing through His linguistic flim flam.

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Ah, youth! More fleeting than magnetic media yet, at times, as deeply ingrained as grooved media, fluttering through time in brief moments of beauty beween the pops and cracks of age. Yet still, amidst the melancholy, my own youthful fist shakes in the air again (unless that’s my Old Man fist shaking at the kids to get off my lawn).

And what burr is under my saddle this time? The great oxymoron of our field, the concept of benign neglect that has been tolerated as something…benign…for too long. Considered favorable, even.

I wonder, how did this idea become accepted practice? My natural disposition toward the expectation of human failure chalks it up to a redefinition of a lucky coincidence. This film was left for an extended period with no archival type care :: The condition is fine :: We can keep doing this as a matter of policy. My paradoxical (aha!) other natural disposition toward empathy understands the resource challenges involved in managing collections and overcoming backlogs. We have to find the level of what is enough to do to properly care for collections in a way that can be efficiently applied across the most assets. I suppose benign neglect fits here perfectly because it can be done all at once to an entire collection no matter the size.

But no. I refuse to believe this is a viable preservation strategy. I refuse to believe that funneling collection management decisions through the expectation of failure (I will not be able to do anything about this so I will not) is an acceptable option. To be a strategy there must be some definition of process and application. Which formats and format qualities does it apply or not apply to? How long of a term should it be applied before items are reviewed for condition? At what point in an assets lifecycle can it reasonably be applied or when is it too late? How do you underscore the “in correct conditions” caveat? And how do you stop the ideology to creeping into areas where it should not be used, where it could be harmful, or where action cannot be put off anymore?

The fact of the matter is that declaring an ideal preservation format must support benign neglect as a strategy subsumes the fact that millions of assets exist already for which such an approach is not possible or that need to be reformatted now.

Failure happens.

Things go a way.

Things are lost.

From my point of view, benign neglect sees these facts and adopts a plan for giving up before starting, rather than giving it a best effort despite the certainty that those efforts will fall short. Neglect is not benign because it is a choice one makes not to act, not just something that happens. The only time neglect is benign is when one refuses to answer phone calls from telemarketers.

Bwaa haa haa!!

— Joshua Ranger

AVPS At Createasphere Digital Asset Management Conference

The AVPS team is excited to be participating in the 2012 Createasphere Digital Asset Management Conference in New York City as both a presenter and an exhibitor. Createasphere provides training, conferences, networking, and other resources regarding the use of technology in the creation and management of media assets. Their regional DAM conferences present real world use cases from end users and experts in the field to discuss the challenges and solutions to managing digital collections.

On the presentation side, Senior Consultant Kara Van Malssen will be chairing the panel What Do You Mean I Need Digital Preservation? I’ve got DAM with presenters Sally Hubbard of HBO and Karen Cariani of WGBH. The panel will discuss the areas where DAMS fulfill the needs of digital preservation and where the systems require supplemental tools and strategies, with input from how these issues are being approached by two of the country’s largest broadcast entities.

You can also catch Kara and the rest of the AVPS team at booth 308 in the Exhibitor Hall. Come chat about your media preservation and collection management needs and pick up some of our popular archiving themed buttons. Createasphere takes place this Thursday and Friday, September 27-28 at the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan. See you there!

Using Open Source And Free Tools For AV Digital Preservation Workflows

Archiving and preservation consist of technology, people, and policies. For technology in particular, digital AV archives are largely indebted and beholden to a few sizable industries: cinema, broadcast, and information technology.

Commercial interests catering to the aforementioned industries have produced a seemingly attractive tool set that has the potential to provide archives with the ability to apply their policies in service of preservation-oriented workflows. Yet, even in the hands of larger well-resourced organizations, employing these tools can be challenging and resource intensive. How can smaller, resource-constrained AV archives efficiently apply cost effective tools and technologies to their workflows?

This article by Kara Van Malssen was originally published in AV Insider, Issue 2, September 2012.

• TOOLS FOR SMALLER BUDGETS (PDF)

Preservation Is Not A Format

An aphoristic interpretation in 10 parts

1. Authorial intent is, for all practical purposes, bunk. It presupposes, fallaciously, either the existence of the singular creator, or the total achievability of an artistic vision.

The former is false because it is a figment of the artist’s imagination. The latter, because it is a figment of the consumer’s imagination.

 

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2. The desired qualities of a format and the availability of a format do not necessarily converge. The adoption of a format for creative uses may be a matter of convenience rather than vision and integrity.

 

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3. Despite the philosophical crutch that Benjamin represents, the problem of reproducable media did not begin with photography. The printing press blew apart the conceptual framework and reliance on hand-copied manuscripts. This resulted in massive increases in literacy, the Protestant Reformation, and American democracy.

Agitation prompted by reproducable media of the 20th century has resulted in The People vs. George Lucas and discussion forum debates over the presentation of Friends in HD.

 

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4. A primary pleasure of the cinema experience — sitting in the dark, the engulfing screen — is that it distracts from the worn, frequently unhygienic setting. The odors are another matter.

Multiplexes compound these issues.

 

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5.

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6. “As it was meant to be seen” is a remnant of the VHS homevideo age, referring merely to the use of the correct aspect ratio, not to format or presentation method. Extrapolation to other aspects of media consumption in an age of non-homogenous platforms is limited at best, tedious at worst.

 

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7. Suggested Library of Congress Subject Heading: Defining parameters of technological purity, Randomness of

 

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8. Planned obsolescence is used as a pejorative when conducted by corporations, as a sign of artistic purity when utilized by creators. Both inhibit future access.

 

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9. Aesthetic valuation is a result of temporal, cultural, and personal interpretation, both at the moment of creation and the moment of consumption. These interpretive moments impact continued future interpretation factatorily.

 

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10. Were we not culturally tied to a base 10 system, 10 aphorisms would still be an arbitrary selection.

 

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— Joshua Ranger

The Present Analog Dark Age

The great thing about predicting doom and gloom is that the end times are always imminent, but never quite here. The natural state of a threat is to loom. If it actually ever happens — hey, you’re prescient! If not, well, there’s still the possibility…

The death of film has been a productive area for prognosticators on both sides of the fence, those lamenting its passing as a Caligulan descent into a cultural morass and those cheering its decease as an evolutionary improvement on par with a whole planetary society of apes, damned and/or dirty though they may be.

Kodak’s recent foray into a market previously deemed too small to be feasible notwithstanding, the death of film has — denying both sides of another fence on the property — been neither greatly exaggerated nor correctly reported. Though we are all legally compelled to consider corporations as people, the death of a non-human entity is not a singular temporal or irreversible event.

Another profitable area where people are encroaching on Nostradamus’ turf is the gnashing of teeth and tolling of bells declaring the coming digital dark age, the period when all digital content will be lost and, because all analog content will have been trashed after it is digitized and posted on the Facebook, all human knowledge will disappear or be locked up in the secular, Internets version of monasteries (i.e., third-party owned server farms) — well, there or, once again, saved in the mouths of the Irish, gar bless ’em — as occurred in the original Dark Ages.

Later arguments aside, are we really in such an intellectual…dark age where we can’t even imagine new historical structures/events without them simply mirroring or borrowing from past epochs we read a paragraph about in Western Civ?

I will here bite my tongue (whilst still I bite my thumb) about an essential misrepresentation of the richness of the medieval period that the pejorative of the Dark Ages (and its Euro-centrism) has bequeathed upon the era, a timespan which itself, like the death of film, has no hard temporal definition.

Rather, I would say, or will say presently, we should set the idea of the coming digital dark ages aside for a moment. Set aside the fear of the future and understand that we are already in the midst of an analog media dark age right… … … now. Formats are obsolete. Archives and individuals do not know what content they have and in many cases do not have the means to access it. Much of our audiovisual heritage is at risk of being lost, but a large portion of that is already effectively lost because it is unfindable and/or inaccessible. Though an item is still physically sitting there on a shelf or in a box and has not burnt up in an Alexandrian fire, that does not mean the content is doing or is able to do its cultural/institutional work.

And really, this is the same state of digital media today as well. Countless files are essentially lost due to lack of findability and usability. The risk of loss is not inherent in the digital/analog divide but is a result of the exponential growth of content creation, material or structural factors of created objects, and the lack of broad resource support for the institutions tasked with preserving our cultural heritage. These factors, and the fear-mongering over the digital dark ages or the loss of even one single object, contribute to an atmosphere of inaction and indecision, one where the horror of future failure obscures the reality of the present and the pathways to managing that reality — pathways we as professionals have the skills to imagine, define, and follow.

— Joshua Ranger

What’s Your Product? New AVPS White Paper On MPLP And Audiovisual Collections

I’ve been nibbling around the edges of this topic for a while — and reviewing my thoughts with other people to see if they all taste the hints of vanilla, cassis, leather, and grass — but now I’ve gone off and written a white paper about More Product, Less Process and audiovisual collections: What’s Your Product? Assessing the suitability of a More Product, Less Process methodology for processing audiovisual collections.

It ain’t exactly the great American novel, unless, of course, you feel that fiction is all lies and drives people away from reality and into their hysterical fantasy worlds. Then I’d say you’d really enjoy this paper. Even if you are one of the 27 people supporting the publishing industry these days, I hope you’ll find something worthwhile to think about or argue with me about in the comments below or directly.

— Joshua (M.) Ranger

Abstract:
The widely referenced and adopted More Product, Less Process methodology (MPLP) represents a much needed evolution in the manner of processing archival collections in order to overcome backlogs and resource shortfalls that institutions face. In the case of audiovisual-based collections, however, the ability to plan budgets, timelines, equipment needs, and other preservation plans that unequivocally impact access is directly tied to the documentation of some degree of item-level knowledge about one’s collection. This paper proposes an extension of the MPLP model which is necessitated to properly address the particular needs of audiovisual and other complex media in a way that properly meets archival standards and that assists the archivist in generating their true product: the provision of the three basic services of Findability, Access, and Sustainability regardless of the format, the content, or the tools used.

• Link to the PDF in English
• Link to the PDF in Spanish

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