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METRO Selects DHP Collection Assessment Grantees

Congratulations to Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives, Lesbian HERStory Archives, and the White Plains Public Library on their selection by the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) to each receive one of the three collection assessment grants being funded by the New York State Documentary Heritage Program.

Is The Product Of Less Process Sufficient For Audiovisual Collections?

Greene and Meissner’s “More Product, Less Process” is both an inspiration to me and one of the banes of my existence. As I’m sure many archivists feel, it’s refreshing to hear an approach to collection processing that is pragmatic and takes into account the realities of the time and personnel required for the work versus what is actually available. In my work I’m often dealing with developing recommendations around workflows, budgets, and other preservation planning needs that need to be reasonable to the individual institution and do-able within the nearer term. Having G&M as a supporting reference point is highly valuable. (That said, by the same token I’m sure that many budget-makers are equally happy to hear that their staff should be doing more with less, as it were.)

Issues of interpretation aside, the glaring problem I have with G&M is that their original article makes no mention of processing film, video, audio, and other complex media objects outside of a few questions in their originating survey. To me, this is a major hole in the logic of their otherwise sound proposition. If they had said, “Our analysis only applies to paper and (generally) photographic collections,” that would be one thing. But for it to be considered standard procedure for “late 20th century” collections is something by which I cannot abide.

To describe paper collections at the folder, box or other higher level and let researchers dig through them to discover items themselves is sensible for the most part. But does that strategy still work when the researcher comes across audiovisual materials that are inaccessible, unlabeled, in too poor of shape to play back, or otherwise facing issues that would prevent a researcher from determining anything about an object outside of apparent format or condition characteristics?

Film can be more fungible in this aspect because of its visual nature – assuming one has space and equipment to wind through or view without projection, and that the film is not too shrunken or solidified into a hockey puck, and that one doesn’t necessarily care about any associated audio track. But where does one start with an unmarked 3/4” U-matic that may not even be a video recording?

The examples could go on, but what I put forth here is that the concept of what the “product” is may not be the same across all situations; it may require adjustment in certain cases. What G&M focus on is the finding aid and moving collections towards access. When dealing with audiovisual materials, accessibility is more often dependent on reformatting or maintaining equipment for the various media types and formats at hand – something not necessarily done or available at collecting institutions.

In this regard, I would propose that the desired product from processing audiovisual materials is not a traditional finding aid, but an item level accounting of the assets – not necessarily at a full descriptive level, and potentially reliant on estimates, but something that at least touches on the technical data points (format, run time, recording standards, etc.) that , combined with a prioritization plan, would help an archive determine their needs for playback or reformatting that would support access.

If the product does not support the basic archival delivery need of access, then the minimalized process does not seem sufficient to even be worth the minimal effort.

— Joshua Ranger

Kara Van Malssen Instructing Digital Preservation For Videotape Workshop

AVPS Senior Consultant Kara Van Malssen will be in Middletown, Connecticut this Friday to conduct a workshop on Digital Preservation for Videotape. Co-sponsored by Independent Media Arts Preservation (IMAP) and the New England Archivists Spring 2012 Meeting, the workshop will review digitization case studies as well as covering the topics:

– Basic digital file creation
– Preservation and access file formats and codecs
– Software
– Storage and trusted digital repositories
– Workflows for digitization, and
– Technical and preservation metadata

IMAP has been providing important resources and training to media collection managers both within and without traditional archives for over 10 years now. This collaboration between NEA and IMAP is a good example of the types of efforts and partnerships our field will have to continue to maintain in order to share knowledge and make sure all collections have an opportunity to be properly cared for. Way to go, and way to go Kara!

AVPS Conducting Preservation Workshops Via METRO/DHP

AudioVisual Preservation Solutions will again be conducting preservation and metadata themed workshops as part of the METRO’s Documentary Heritage Program service offerings. The first day-long class will be Processing Audio and Video Collections on Friday, April 20th. The instructors will include AVPS Senior Consultant Joshua Ranger and Consultant Marian Clarke.

Three more workshops will be offered over the spring and summer, including Using Metadata for Audiovisual Collection Management, Managing File-based Collection for Smaller Institutions, and another session on Processing Audio and Video Collections. This year, two of the classes will be held in Westchester County in order to provide better service to the full METRO membership area. Other instructors will include AVPS Senior Consultant Kara Van Malssen and Consultant Peter Oleksik. Dates and locations to be announced soon. And many thanks to METRO and the New York State Archives for subsidizing these offerings.

Don’t Kill The Carrier Part 2 — The Digital Dilemma Is A Resource Problem Not A Format Problem

I hate digital cameras. I especially hate my digital camera, but that’s probably at least in part because my own camera provides me so many more opportunities to swear at it. I damn it when I miss a shot due to shutter delay or the processing time between pictures. I curse up and down when it keeps insisting on the wrong focal point. I make sailors cringe when my memory of the scene that impelled me to take a photo is not matched, ending up yet again as a flat, poorly framed, uncomposed mess.

These things doubly frustrate me because, not so many years ago when I shot on film with a 30 year old SLR, I took great care with my framing, depth of focus, and subject matter. I knew my camera, knew my film, and, aided by a great developer, was very happy with the outcomes. Even failure was an acceptable part of the process; only a small percentage of photos could be expected to turn out close to okay. How, I wonder, can this digital camera be such a piece of infuriating junk?

But then I recall that the thing which drove me to getting an SLR in the first place was a similar frustration with the pictures I was getting with the no-frills point-and-shoot I had for many years. When the only tool you have is a point-and-shoot, everything looks like a snapshot.

So really I have three choices here (unless the real problem is just anger management issues that need resolved): 1) go back to film, 2) shell out for a digital SLR and really learn how to use it, or 3) just accept my crummy camera and deal with it. Two of those options involve an increased outlay of cash and effort, and, well, Game of Thrones just came out on DVD.

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In my experience, most people who have been drawn into the archiving and preservation/conservation fields enjoy many outside creative pursuits, whether related to one’s area of focus (film-making, writing, sewing, etc.) or well outside one’s realm (cooking, dance, macrame, etc.). This makes perfect sense, especially in audiovisual preservation where a traditional route into the field has been transitioning from making to care-taking. However, I also strongly feel that the activities and decision points of archiving/preservation are creative acts themselves, requiring at least as much knowledge and skill as the creation of the works under our care.

This is none too controversial a thought within our bubble, but, for those unfamiliar with what and how we do, it perhaps sounds a bit laughable — the same way that people who have never taught may really believe that those who cannot do teach. In both cases, as well as in other fields like editing, the breadth of stylistic and technical knowledge required to shepherd so many and such varied works/minds through growth and persistence is massive.

In thinking about those who deal with more hands-on conservation work, just consider the number of materials, color processes, formats, format characteristics, presentation methods, chemicals, etc. that must be worked with, not to mention the ability to interpret and properly represent various historic and individual styles. However this work must necessarily be accompanied by a degree of humility or dedication to works and artists, stances that, as a result, can keep us pinned to obscurity or lack of awareness from the outside.

For people who purposefully choose a career that can often entail long hours of solitude in windowless rooms and basements, such obscurity is not necessarily a bad thing — though it can contribute to the difficulties we have with lack of support, the need for constant advocacy around the importance of the work, and, ultimately, the limited resources most organizations deal with.

A lack of resources is one of the true dilemmas of the digital age. Just like the utility and transportation infrastructure of the nation, the infrastructure of institution is in need of serious overhaul in order to address the existing and pending influx of digitized and born-digital materials. Equipment, facilities, servers, policies, utilities, guidelines, metadata generation, know-how… Not just financial resources, but also human resources, knowledge resources, and reservoirs of determination to start projects and get things done.

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Not to say we lack the internal resources (or ability to attain them) needed to manage digital collection, but we have to admit that technological shifts are forcing many of us to retrain our brains in ways that are difficult or discomforting. Especially for those ashamed of the amount of time spent listening to Bob Seeger on classic rock radio (okay — I’m sure that’s just me), a creative spirit rails against the idea of being hedged in by numbers. Not wanting to be just another one. One is the loneliest. Havoc-causing love potions. Revolutions. Numbers suggest a lack of uniqueness, intangibility, and a lack of nuance. And the way we have traditionally spoken about digital files is as numbers: 1s and 0s piling up with no sense of aesthetic order or individuality.

At the same time, numbers are how things get done. How much stuff do you have? How much storage space? How many FTE to process? How many users? How much money?

Administrators and funders demand quantifications that fly in the face of what we consider the special qualities of collections. And files seem to act the same way — they have no care for content, just for processing, movement, and dull persistence of those 1s and 0s.

But this is a bit of a canard. No object expresses emotion or forms a reciprocal relationship with us. Such things are easier to believe with physical, tactile materials that act/react in discernable, predictable ways, but their mere materiality makes the conceits no more true. In truth, our jobs are half about the persistence of objects — whether physical or digital — and half about the dull persistence of advocacy, continually communicating the importance of our work and the need for funding and resources.

In truth, one of the prime resources we have and that we need to access in order to address the “digital dilemma” is ourselves — the creativity and learnedness and curiosity (and persistence) we can and must tap into.

In truth, many colleagues have been working very hard in the area of digital preservation. They have been working hard for many years and have made great strides that we are beginning to see the results of. The Academy’s Digital Dilemma II ends with the declaration that the time for studies and reports is over. Convenient though it is to state and declare the final word, the report is correct. The time for broad overview studies is over — it actually has been over for many years. But I guess it was easy to miss because there was that new season of Buffy coming out on DVD.

— Joshua Ranger

AVPS Moves Office Location

AudioVisual Preservation Solutions has moved offices from 350 7th Avenue, Suite 1603 to 350 7th Avenue, Suite…1605! Though an indistinguishable move in terms of our GPS trackers, the relocation reflects our expanding team and client base. 2012 is shaping up to be an exciting year already with lots of great projects under way, a number of conferences we’ll be presenting at or attending, and a bevy of new services we’re offering around digital preservation, data management, digital asset utilization, and inventory and collection assessment. Of course we wouldn’t be here without all of our great clients we’ve worked with in the past and continue to collaborate with to tackle the challenges of archiving and preservation. We look forward to the continued building of relationships and solutions, so whether you’re in the virtual or real neighborhood, come up and see us some time.

METRO & AVPS Announce NYC/Westchester County Collection Assessment Grants

The Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) recently announced the availability of three collection assessment grants to be awarded to institutions in METRO’s New York City and Westchester County service area.

The funding for these grants stems from a collaboration with the Document Heritage Program of the New York State Archives (DHP), a mandated initiative committed to preserving New York’s documentary heritage. Through state-supported funding and education, DHP helps non-profit organizations maintain their archival records. Areas of particular interest include materials documenting education policy, environmental affairs, mental health, the tragedy of September 11, 2001, and population groups and economic change in the 20th and 21st centuries.

To be eligible for the grant, archives must be located within New York City or in Westchester county. This particular grant targets collections or sub-collections containing less than 3,000 items. The items in these collections must be limited to a single media type. These media types include magnetic media (audio and/or videotape), motion picture film, or still photographs.

At the beginning of the project, AVPS will visit the archive to examine the collections and the facilities that house them. During this phase, AVPS consultants will conduct in-person interviews with staff members to understand how the archive operates and where the collections fit within its framework. Current databases, cataloging schemas, and storage practices will be assessed at this time.

Once AVPS completes a full evaluation of the collections, the findings will be compiled into a report. This documentation includes a ranked breakdown of the collection’s contents according to reformatting urgency. In addition to this list, the report recommends storage requirements for physical materials and ideal formats for preservation, mezzanine, and access copies of digitized content. Finally, the report suggests local vendors or required in-house digitization equipment and provides a general reformatting workflow.

By the project’s completion, the archive will have in-hand the full report along with vendor or equipment cost quotes, rehousing and labor cost estimates, and a complete lists of the collection’s formats, durations, and projected sizes after digitization.

If selected, the archive’s staff must accept the conditions and responsibilities associated with the project. They must designate a central point of contact for coordinating and communicating with AVPS. Key staff members must participate in 60 to 90 minute interviews with AVPS consultants or complete questionnaires. After coordinating the site visits, the archive’s staff must provide AVPS consultants access to the collections and share existing collection documentation that is pertinent to the project. Once they receive the final reports, staff should review them and offer constructive feedback.

In addition to these obligations, the archivist and an administrator must agree to talk about the project at a METRO event. The archivist must agree to speak at a conference, on a panel, or at a professional event about the project and its impact on their collections. In addition writing the letter of commitment, an administrator must also consent to be a part of an Administrators Roundtable event. Participants will include other library administrators and archive collection managers from the area. The purpose of the event will be to consider the challenges and solutions associated with preserving media. Ultimately, an account of the discussion will be documented and distributed through a white paper by METRO. In the future, METRO may consult this white paper when developing programming for the library and archive community. AVPS and METRO will schedule and coordinate these local events.

To be considered, fill out the online application form.  An administrator must supplement the application with a letter explicitly outlining how the assessment will help them move forward with their current projects. The archivist must also write a letter committing to speak at a METRO event about the project. Templates for the Administrator’s Letter of Commitment and the Archivist’s Panel Presentation Commitment Letter are located within the online form. Signed copies are these letters are a required portion of the application. The deadline for applications is Tuesday, February 29th, 2012, at 4:00 pm. The selected archives will be contacted by mid to late March, and AVPS will conduct the assessments in April and early May.

Any questions? Send us an e-mail and we’ll be happy to answer them.

AVPS Now Official FEDLINK Vendor

As part of team CACI, AudioVisual Preservation Solutions in now able to offer media preservation services to FEDLINK member institutions. The Federal Library & Information Network (FEDLINK) is a purchasing, training and resource-sharing consortium serving federal libraries and information centers, providing smaller departments and organizations with access to products and services more affordably and efficiently.

Services under the LC/FEDLINK BOA that AVPS is able to offer include:

Collection Assessments and Inventories
Preservation Planning
Facilities Assessment
Training for Archiving and Preservation
Metadata Development
Digitization Planning
Repository Development
DAMS Selection
Digital Preservation Planning
Disaster Preparedness and Recovery
Digital Content Management/Delivery Support Services

Along with our special expertise with audiovisual and digital assets, we are able to provide these services for all media types, including graphics, photography, and paper/text materials. FEDLINK members can contact us through our webform or directly to discuss how we can help with the preservation and collection management needs of all your analog and digital media and documents.

AVPS FEDLINK Lead: Joshua Ranger, Senior Consultant
josh{at}avpreserve.com
212.564.2140/917.475.9630
Service ID: CI
LC/FEDLINK BOA#: LC11G7907
Transfer or Direct Payment Options

Kara Van Malssen Invited To Address Preservation And Archiving Special Interest Group

AVPS Senior Consultant will be speaking in front of the Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG) meeting in Austin, Texas this Thursday, January 12th. Kara’s talk, “The Key Ingredient: Technical, Structural and Preservation Metadata for Digital Media Preservation” will be part of the Domain Deep Dive: Media Preservation panel, which will also feature presentation by Ernst Van Velzen (CIO, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision), Jon Dunn (Library Technologies and Digital Libraries, Indiana University), and Kurt Seiffert (Research Storage, Indiana University).

PASIG is an international community of IT professionals “focused on sharing open computing solutions and best practices” in the areas of OAIS architecture, repository technologies, preservation and archiving of data, and the uses of various commercial and community-developed technological solutions. PASIG is not a standards-setting organization, but much of their work revolves around sharing and learning from practical experience in order to find new areas of development and collaboration.

Given the major challenges that face the preservation and management of digital audiovisual materials, we are very pleased to see groups like PASIG take an interest in the issues and devote a panel specifically to media. It is becoming more and more apparent that greater communication and collaboration among the various disciplines that create, manage, and care for digital media is needed in order to address those challenges. We’re proud of Kara and excited to be a part of the conversation.

Does The Discovery Of ‘Lost’ Materials Help Or Harm The Archival Field?

About the only times audiovisual archiving and preservation gets mentioned in the news is when there is a re-release of a newly restored film or album, or when some amazing discovery of a ‘lost’ work is revealed (which is usually tied to the bigger story of its re-release or sale). The auctioning of the early Walt Disney film “Hungry Hobos” and the unveiling of a 1973 David Bowie performance on the BBC are just a couple recent examples. Admittedly, this is probably due at least in part to the fact that lots of archiving work is detail-oriented, quiet, technical, and repetitive at times. These are all just nice ways of saying the work is dull (at least from a news story standpoint). Most people assume that I get to watch/listen to great content all day or ask what things I have unearthed from obscurity. This makes me uncertain about whether the news stories drive their perception or if the news really is just delivering what non-archivists care about. Whatever the case, I typically (over)emphasize to people that I don’t get the opportunity to access the content I work with; it’s all about the physical objects. Boxes and boxes and boxes and shelves and shelves and shelves of objects. And drawers. And pallets. And piles on the floor.

I do have a discovery story, but I don’t really like to refer to it as such. Why? During a summer internship at the NYU Library Preservation Lab, the Tamiment/Wagner Archive received the Communist Party USA papers, a massive collection of paper, memorabilia, film, video, audiotape, and more dating back to the early 20th century. As part of a first pass at ingest, a fellow intern and myself were tapped to go through the films to looks for any major condition problems and get a very high level inventory to help with prioritization. We were excited because there was a lot of 35mm, much of it in old metal shipping containers labeled in Russian. Turns out, though, the CPUSA merely screened or distributed acceptable Soviet films, because reel after reel were prints of Russian history or war epics from the 60s and 70s, sometimes two or three copies of each. It was my first exposure to Orwo filmstock, but I’m not sure if even I am hardcore enough to have gotten really pumped about that.

But there was one particular metal box… There were some others like it, but they hadn’t had anything special in them. But this one stunk real bad-like when we opened it. I tried it first and quickly decided to attack a different box. The other intern tried later, but it was the end of a long, dusty, chemically day…and there was one more non-stinky box left for her. So after I finished what I was working on, I put on the gloves and the mask and said goodbye to my nose hairs and some brain cells. As I started pulling out reels, I noticed that the stench was more complex than a vinegar smell, that what appeared to be rust inside the can was all over the film, and that the solidification and bubbling gunk I could see through the projection reels was not typical behavior of acetate from the 1970s, whether the East Germans had made it or not. Nope, this was nitrate, and luckily most of the reels were heads out with the title cards for the reel visible. Passaic Textile Strike Reel 2. Passaic Textile Strike Reel 4. Passaic Textile Strike Reel 5. And so on.

After the nitrate excitement died down, my colleague began searching for the title online and found that the Library of Congress had a print, but two reels were considered lost, including reel 5. Things moved fast after that. Somebody called a contact at LOC. The head of the department and the Tamiment archivist were called in. We had to find someone with nitrate shipping certification. And soon the films were out the door to LOC. They were pretty seriously decayed, but that’s where all that slow, detailed, technical (dull) work comes in to play to do the restoration work.

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Exciting stuff, but not ‘my’ or ‘a’ discovery. There were a lot of people involved in the overall process, and I was just the one to physically pull the reels out of the box and look at them. Also, the film was not truly lost or discovered. It was sitting there in a box, not caring one way or the other. It couldn’t be lost because no one was missing it. Anyone at anytime could have peeked in the box and wondered what was on those reels.

In fact, it should have been someone else. If an organization or an archive truly cares about the materials they create or collect, if they care about the investments made in creating and storing those materials, if they care about the longevity of their organization and fulfillment of organizational goals then, plain and simple, they should take care of their stuff. #tcys and whatnot.

To be clear, I’m not picking on archives here — this diatribe refers to the whole enterprise. Either you have pride in your work or you don’t, and that institutional attitude or support for it starts at the top. This doesn’t mean that the organization absolutely must care about those assets, but to market them based on quality of the content/materials or the institution’s history/dedication would seem to require a certain degree of commitment to those expressed ideals in order to retain any level of validity.

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And that, my friends, is polemics (I minored in it in college). Do you agree in total? Do you reject it outright? Do you agree in principle but not in practical reality? I’d like to know, but, I feel, save for the derailment, the gauge of my original track is true. ‘Lost’ films are not the result of inevitability (unless you believe that humans will inevitably mess things up), but are lost through our own decisions at action or inaction. The celebration of their discovery turns irresponsible behavior into an applauded activity. This approval, and subsequent social/monetary benefit, promotes hoarding, negligence, and other high risk behaviors enabled by the belief that 1) the ultimate payoff will be great and 2) the material will always be recoverable.

One has to assume that, given human and corporate nature, the potential for benign neglect as a preservation strategy would become the default position in most cases. After one assumes that, one has to ask, has the line between benign and malignant ever been sufficiently delineated so as to ensure that action occurs before it is crossed, and what extra cost is incurred if that line is ignored, despite the potential capability of recovering the content? Perhaps, in this arena, we need to better document our less direct failures and losses in order to counter the distracting jubilation of films grasped from the ravages of decay, to fully delineate the real costs and risks so that we take care of our stuff in the first place or accept the decision not to.

— Joshua Ranger

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