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Things That Shouldn’t Be Archived #6 — Thanksgiving Edition

This edition isn’t really in regards to the content of the below. I’ve enjoyed my share of blaxsploitation films and the 42nd Street Forever series. It’s just that watching this hits a little too close to home in reminding me of family holidays when I was growing up…and those hits actually do feel very similar to be whacked with high-heeled shoes.

Jive Turkey

aka Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes “It’s a turf battle over the mean streets of Harlem between Italian mobsters and the black hoodlums living in the neighborhood run by “Big Tony” (Frank DeKove). The fighting becomes intense as each side tries to push the other out, with both groups bringing in their best hit men. Watch for a brutal transvestite mobster who kills with her high-heeled shoes.”

Happy Thanksgiving!

— Joshua Ranger

Dave Rice Addressing Conservation Science Annual/Eastern Analytical Symposium

Following up on some whiz bang panels at IASA/AMIA 2010, Dave Rice was invited to speak today at the Eastern Analytical Symposium (EAS) as part of a special Conservation Science Annual (CSA) symposium entitled Digital Media in Cultural Heritage: New Preservation Technologies. Dave will be discussing Audiovisual Analysis and Quality Control: New Methods using File and Machine Based Metadata which will cover the use of the analytical tools AVPS has been developing — such as DVAnalyzer, BWFMetaEdit, and FATMAP — that help bring new levels of inspection and collection management control to file-based media collections.

The EAS is “the world’s leading community for analytical chemists seeking the highest quality education and career development”, bringing “noted authorities in the field” together to speak to “analytical chemists, managers, and academicians” from across a wide range of fields. Visit http://www.eas.org/ for more information.

The CSA is coordinated in conjunction with the EAS by the New York Conservation Foundation to address the “scientific aspect of the preservation of cultural heritage such as art, architecture and archaeological materials: conservation science, the analytical methods and technology.” Visit http://www.iiconservation.org/events/index.php?idnr=453 for more information.

To step away from be all analytical about things, we’re excited to see all the organizations that are beginning to seriously address the issue of digital preservation and we are proud to be part of the conversation…And we’re proud of Dave, too!

Creating History To Maintain History

Among the less savory identities I tried on in my middle school years as I fished around from some sort of individuality was that of a sports stat head — the kind of person that would give a detailed speech on how to pitch for the Public Speaking section of Language Arts class but who wouldn’t pick up a baseball unless cleaning up after one’s tomboy sisters.

I liked to think that I distinguished myself through my abstruse selectivity of which teams or athletes I focused my attentions on, leaning heavily towards the underdog, the old-timer nearing or beyond 40 years of age (in a pre-PED era, mind you), the outlier, the mudder… Watching Dale Murphy pop home runs in a sad, empty Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium was much more interesting to me than another Montana-Rice downfield bomb.

I have a much deeper appreciation of Pete Incaviglia than you do.

(Caveat: At that time, my hometown was well outside the terrestrial broadcast range of all but one professional sports team, so I really didn’t have a lot of choice in what teams the networks or cable would occasionally show, and thus for whom I would root.)

I think about this period a lot because of the relation between the sorting and arranging of baseball cards on which I spent many a weekend and my current workaday career. But the topic resonated in a different way after reading a recent-ish article in the Times about the Major League Baseball archives and the cataloging/tagging of footage. Sports and porn have been traditional leaders in the development of video technologies and distribution methods, and the article shows that MLB is working at a high level of metadata capture, and making that metadata work for them.

The amount of intellectual control evinced in the article is impressive, and the methodology/workflow in its documentation is, for lack of better words, reallyreallycool (he said, pushing his glasses up). Switching to the other side of the plate to bat, however, I think there are some further instructive lessons here. First, no archivist should feel inadequate. MLB has a number of incentives driving these efforts, incentives that are several degrees of magnitude greater — in terms of fiscal economics — than for most AV collections. The almost hourly need during baseball season to distribute information and content externally via the web and broadcast programs, internally via workflows that monitor games and umpiring, and archivally via the identification and preservation of historical events lies outside the norm of most archives.

The second lesson is also about economic incentive, but of social economics rather than strict monetary concerns. One facet at the core of the popularity of sports is narrative. Stories from baseball’s past are repeated at least yearly; stories from a career are repeated at least weekly; stories from a season are repeated at least daily. There are grand narrative arcs and smaller subplots that help define, reinforce, assess, predict, and synthesize events, personalities, and the organization as a whole. The footage of Yogi Berra jumping into Don Larsen’s arms after his World Series perfect game is hauled out during the post-season to help give shape to what is about to occur and why it matters (i.e., why you should be watching): these are the moments when the pressures make the normal activities of the regular season more difficult, when the great ones rise to the challenge, and when there is a constant opportunity to see something historic happen from unexpected sources. After the 2010 post-season, footage of Roy Halladay will now be forever linked with the Don Larsen footage. The new story snaps neatly into the continuing narrative to expand and confirm: Heros still exist. The present is tied to the past, which establishes an underlying structure of stability to the unpredictability of life. There is value derived in looking back and hope in looking forward.

Based on my ramblings, the lesson here obviously isn’t one on proper gramatical and logical structure. Rather, what I think we can pull out from the MLB experience is, at a basic level, further proof in the value of a comprehensive approach to metadata. The greater the degree of intellectual control, the greater the degree of reuse of materials. Enabling deeper levels of access promotes more extensive access and novel uses of assets, and these efforts can be enhanced and made more efficient by identifying the parameters of what data is most pertinent.

At a more complex level is a lesson in the high value of actively cultivating social significance and in developing stories around collections to better advocate for them and promote access. The past occurs[?] and is documented, but it requires exposure and contextualization to maintain wider relevance. Archives occur (though they are not necessarily documented), but their contents require exposure and contextualization to promote their relevance within an institution and to a wider public.

It is not that un-monetized content is less valuable, but its true value is just more difficult to express — just as it’s more difficult to define the benefit of the utility infielder, the bunter, or the long reliever in comparison to the power hitter and the staff ace. Of course, that divide in baseball has been narrowed by the hard work done by stat head sabermetricians over the recent past number of years. Hmmm…

— Joshua Ranger

AVPS Funds New AMIA Scholarship To Honor World Day For Audiovisual Heritage

In celebration of World Day for Audiovisual Heritage 2010, AudioVisual Preservation Solutions, in collaboration with the Association of Moving Image Archivists is pleased to announce the YADA! Scholarships for Education in Fundraising (PDF of news release). Three annual scholarships will funded by AVPS and awarded through the AMIA Awards Committee aimed at providing moving image and sound archivists with opportunities for education in fundraising.

Background:

On World Day for Audiovisual Heritage 2009, AVPS announced the Your Archive Deserves Advocacy! initiative (https://www.avpreserve.com/avpsresources/about-yada/), an effort focused on promoting the people and stories behind archives as well as providing resources that support advocacy. As part of the YADA! initiative, and in celebration of World Day for Audiovisual Heritage 2010, AVPS is funding three separate scholarship awards to help offset the cost of attending Foundation Center training classes. The Foundation Center is a national nonprofit service organization whose mission is to strengthen the nonprofit sector by providing information and resources that enable improved knowledge and access to philanthropic organizations. Their in-person and web-based workshops offer guidance and resources to help organizations obtain grants and other funding opportunities. The Foundation Center has regional centers for resources and training in Atlanta, Cleveland, New York, San Francisco, and Washington DC. For more information on the Foundation Center and the classes they offer, visit foundationcenter.org.

How does Fundraising Relate to Advocacy?

The activities involved in caring for audiovisual collections extend well beyond daily efforts such as arrangement, cataloging, reformatting, and providing access. These other activities involve an equally extensive set of endeavors that can roughly be defined as advocacy, including:

• acquisition of funding
• communication with administration and other organizational departments
• public promotion and outreach
• planning
• community involvement, and more

Congratulations To 2010 NYART Award Winners

A hearty congratulations to the well-deserving FOAVPS (Friends of AVPS) Grace Lile, Archivist and Director of Operations at WITNESS, and the fine folks at the Jazz Loft Project who will be honored the evening of October 20th, 2010 by the Archivists Roundtable of Metropolitan New York.

Grace has been awarded the 2010 Archival Achievement Award for the spectacular work she has done to establish and maintain the WITNESS video archive documenting worldwide human rights and social justice issues. Along with the help of a dedicated staff and interns Grace’s efforts have included planning and implementation of extensive cataloging and digitization projects that will make the archive more searchable and usable by researchers and others, as well as the development of innovative guidelines and tools for the submission of video from across the globe in variable formats. Our own Chris Lacinak will be one of the proud presenters of Grace’s award.

The Jazz Loft Project is being honored with the Award for Innovative Use of Archives. The access to the treasure of photographs and audio recordings of jazz musicians captured by Eugene Smith in his 6th Avenue New York City loft from 1957-1965 opened up by the Project is establishing new levels of knowledge about the history of jazz during one of its most vibrant periods. The past year has also seen the fruition of years of work from Sam Stephenson, Jazz Loft Project Director, and contributors from The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, WNYC Radio, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Alfred A. Knopf, and the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. Activities have included the publishing of a book on Eugene Smith and the Jazz Loft, a series of programs from Sarah Fishko on WNYC Radio in New York, and a travelling exhibition of materials that opened at the New York Public Library.

Congratulations also to the Leon Levy Foundation, winner of the award for Outstanding Support of Archives. The Leon Levy Foundation is a not-for-profit foundation established to continue Leon Levy’s philanthropic legacy and to build on his vision, encouraging and supporting excellence in six broad areas: Understanding the Ancient World; Arts and Humanities; Preservation of Nature and Gardens; Brain Research and Science; Human Rights; and Jewish Culture. The generous support of such foundations and granting agencies help make sure that organizations like WITNESS and the Jazz Loft Project can do their valuable work.

Hope to see you at the awards ceremony!

Process

When I was nigh about 8 or 9 years old, I decided I wanted to learn Russian. This wasn’t an idea that just floated into my head out of nowhere — as a Cold War child, the Soviets were very much front and center in my consciousness. (Though that situation also may have been because I am a communist anchor baby and the brain implants I received were just doing their work.) I could pretend to a precocious nobility here and claim that this desire arose from some sort of personal glasnost. However, the fact is, I was a punk who had already supped on a steady diet of Mad and Cracked, and learning Russian sounded very anti-establishment to me.

Of course, living in a Northwest logging town, it wasn’t as if there were regular Russian classes available, so I turned to the only resource I knew — the children’s section at the County Library. Probably not surprisingly (there must have been earlier anchor babies than I), there was a Russian picture-book dictionary in the stacks, which I happily added to my pile of Mad back issues, Ray Bradbury, and Encyclopedia Brown.

When I got home, I found the prospect to be more difficult than I had imagined. Seems that Russian uses a different alphabet, don’t you know. Luckily, there was a handy transliteration chart in the back that showed what the Cyrillic letters were equated to in American. This was obviously the key I was looking for that would allow me to translate English words into Russian. If D=Д, O=О, and G=Г, then ДОГ was DOG.

I tested my new found knowledge by applying it in reverse, taking the Russian words from the picture dictionary and transforming them into English. To my frustration and confusion, it didn’t work. How could ‘собака’ be ‘dog’? I had already figured that word out. It didn’t make sense. After a few more attempts, I put the defective book aside and moved on to something more immediately satisfying, like Pixie Stix or something.

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Eventually I figured out the difference between translation and transliteration — that or I was highly skilled at buffaloing my foreign language teachers — but it wouldn’t be the last time I would have to deal with overcoming a conceptual shift in order to learn a new skill. I think about this a lot not only because the speed of changing technologies has presented a steady stream of shifts within my lifetime, but also because of the huge conceptual shifts that are a part of media archiving and preservation practices. Of course we all are quite familiar with the differences between best practices within traditional paper archiving and those required for time-based media — though we surprisingly still have to hammer away at those to be acknowledged.

Of great help along with that hammer have been other tools developed over the years to specifically address the needs of media preservation: The AD Strips and other resources developed by Image Permanence Institute, the FACET tool and guidelines out of Indiana University, optical scanning of mechanical audio carriers developed through collaboration of Library of Congress and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the development of new metadata schemas such as PBCore that better address the variability of how media is produced and used. It seems almost banal to mention them now, like writing an ode to a ratchet set, but isn’t that a whole lot better than trying to make do with a couple pairs of pliers in a space that’s too close to get very much leverage or movement in?

Which now makes me think, maybe it isn’t entirely a reconceptualization of ideology that is important here, but also a initial conceptualization of tools and processes. We are working towards the same basic goal — getting the nut off the bolt; establishing access to and maintaining existence of an object and its content — but the avenues towards that endpoint are quite different. Which now makes me think about the current major conceptual shift in archiving and preservation: the shift in practices dealing with analog media to those dealing with file-based and born digital media. Perhaps the struggle to establish standards and practices is not entirely a problem of thinking about the management of digital objects differently than physical objects, but also an issue of not having a full set of tools for inspection and management.

We make use of a number of tools such as dvgrab, ffmpeg, DATXtract, Live Capture Plus, MediaInfo, and PBCore, but most of these were not developed specifically for archiving needs. As a result, AVPS has made the development of tools and resources a major component of our work. We have been involved in developing DVAnalyzer, which allows a user to inspect and analyze the quality of a DV stream captured over firewire from DVCam; BWF MetaEdit, which allows a user to view and edit the embedded metadata in a Broadcast WAV file; PBCore Instantiationizer, which automates the creation of PBCore instantiation elements based on the embedded metadata in file-based assets; and a number of other internal tools or resources in development that can be used to assess or manage file-based collections.

Of course we aren’t the only ones working on this. For example, METRO’s new book Digitization in the Real World is full of strategies and methodologies for digital collection management, and the Dance Heritage Coalition has been doing innovative work on the development of online cataloging utilities and access. What is needed is a greater allocation of efforts and resources directed towards developing these new tools before too much is lost. The make up of digital media will not allow us to wait 50 years before addressing persistence and continuing access. Мы должны подействовать теперь, comrade.

— Joshua Ranger

Metafun And Metagames

We here at AVPS work hard but, because we really enjoy our work, we find a lot of fun in it to. Like with metadata. Sure, in some ways metadata is just a tool — it does a lot of heavy lifting and is seen as blandly compartmentalizing what is of real value, the content of the object described.

Par example, this image was posted as NARA’s Historical Document of the Day:

“…Leathernecks use scaling ladders to storm ashore at Inchon in amphibious invasion September 15, 1950…”

Of course one thinks beautiful black and white photo, important historical documentation, etc., but the content considered from a wider view also prompts thoughts about how amazing it is that material like this is recorded in the midst of such circumstances. Whatever your feelings about the actions involved, it’s pretty impressive that there are people trained by the military (and has been a tradition of doing such) to go out with the troops and document what is happening on film or video (or digital capture card). This reminds me of some ideas I’ve been playing around with about the roots of independent cinema in military training from the World Wars, but that’s another post.

Like any good archivist, however, after looking at the content I began to look at the associated catalog record. Part of the record description states “General Photograph File of the U.S. Marine Corps, 1927 – 1981; Records of the U.S. Marine Corps, 1775 – 9999 ; Record Group 127; National Archives.” (my emphasis). Records of the U.S. Marine Corps, 1775 – 9999…That means the records date back to 1775, but also that the expectation is for the records to continue on for some time into the future (or maybe just that 9999 is the new 2012).

Digging around some more, the creator is listed as “Department of Defense. Department of the Navy. U.S. Marine Corps. (09/18/1947 – )”, which points to the period when around WWII the various services began to develop centralized media production and distribution departments. This also suggests an organizational realignment within the Marine Corps but also within the structure of the government. You can see, via NARA’s great online catalog, that associated creator names include Department of the Navy. U.S. Marine Corps. (1834 – 09/18/1947), U.S. Marine Corps. (1798 – 1834), and Continental Marines. (11/10/1775 – 1798). A little research shows that 9/18/47 is actually the date that the Department of Defense was officially established (partly as a way to decrease inter-service rivalry), and thus the name change. Makes one wonder what the other naming changes relate to historically and how they came about…

A short history lesson and an urge to learn more — Thank you, metadata!

Oh jeeze I’m a nerd.

— Joshua Ranger

AVPS AMIA/IASA 2010

Charles Wilson Peale, John Wanamaker, Boyz II Men… The groundwork for Philly Cool has been slowly built up over the centuries; now AMIA is bringing that destiny to fruition. The Association of Moving Image Archivists annual conference will be held at the historic Loews Philadelphia Hotel, November 2-6, 2010. In celebration of AMIA’s 20th anniversary and in acknowledgement of the worldwide import of audiovisual preservation needs, this year’s conference will be held jointly with the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives annual conference. Collaboration, integrable standards, and open communication among practitioners of the array of careers that relate to archiving and preservation are becoming necessary activities for doing our work well, especially in the face of the growing need for digital preservation. The joint AMIA/IASA Conference will provide the perfect opportunity to begin dialogs and develop the relationships that will contribute to the future success of the field.

In support of this significant opportunity, AudioVisual Preservation Solutions will be chairing or presenting on a number of panels for both AMIA and IASA.

Moving to a Digital Asset Management Environment: A Case Study on Fresh Air

Chair: Dave Rice – AudioVisual Preservation Solutions

Speakers: Julian Herzfeld – WHYY
Daniel Pisarski – TelVue Corporation

Embedded Metadata: A Look Inside Issues and Tools

Speakers: Chris Lacinak – AudioVisual Preservation Solutions
Dave Rice – AudioVisual Preservation Solutions
George Blood – George Blood Audio

Wrappers and Codecs: A Survey of Selection Strategies

Chair: Chris Lacinak – AudioVisual Preservation Solutions

Speakers: Carl Fleischhauer – Library of Congress
Isaiah Beard – Rutgers University
Hannah Frost – Stanford University

Tech MD: Is There a Doctor in the House?

Chairs: Chris Lacinak – AudioVisual Preservation Solutions
David Rice – AudioVisual Preservation Solutions

Speakers: Hannah Frost – Stanford University
Kate Murray – National Archives and Records Administration

Digital Audio Interstitial Errors: Raising Awareness and Developing New Methodologies for Detection

Speaker: Chris Lacinak – AudioVisual Preservation Solutions

Funding Outside of the Box

Chair: Kara Van Malssen – New York University

Speakers: Chris Lacinak – AudioVisual Preservation Solutions
Dirk Van Dall – Broadway Video Digital Media

Transcoding 101: The Mechanics and Application of Digital Video Conversion Within the Archive

Chairs: Dave Rice – AudioVisual Preservation Solutions
Angelo Sacerdote – Bay Area Video Coalition

Speakers: Skip Elsheimer – AV Geeks

For the description of these and other conference panels as well conference registration information, visit http://www.amiaconference.com/. We’ll see you at the top of the stairs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art!

Movement

My family is the type that loves nothing more than teasing one another. Well, maybe some fresh caught Steelhead or Chinook on the barbeque and an assortment of West Coast microbrews rank pretty high, too, but such activities can easily run concomitantly to teasing.

It is through such family bonding that I found out I have a (according to them) somewhat unorthodox running style. Intense and scowling focus, straight up posture with high knees; in pictures it tends to look more like I’m high-step marching rather than running.

My form is something I developed on my own, not really thinking there was anything odd about it. When I finally got back into running at the age of mumblemumblemumble after a mumblemumblemumble year hiatus, I joined a large group training for a 10-mile race. When we started getting up in the 8-10 mile range in our weekly group runs, my running partner and I started noticing we were all doing the shuffle run. At some point, your body and mind give out, but driven by momentum or some reptilian brain automated muscle twitches, you just keep going. Your form is bad, you’ve slowed noticeably, and your feet are barely leaving the ground like some teenager shuttling around in flipflops, but you keep moving – creeping, really – along.

As I got deeper into running, at some point I decided a goal was to avoid the shuffle run. My solution was to always focus on making sure my feet pushed off and fully left the ground, forcing myself when tired to keep lifting my legs and maintain my pace – thus resulting in my high-steppin’ style. There are likely a number of inefficiencies in my form due to the heavy dependence on my thighs, but it works for me. I get from the beginning of a run to the end of a run without looking like a zombie, and my speed has increased dramatically since then. The in-between takes a high level of energy and focus, but the end results are well beyond what I thought this aged body was capable of.

I have always been interested in the in-between: the process from here to there; that which is not easily defined as one thing or t’other; the forgotten spaces in cities and buildings that exist where hidden work or unexpected activities go on. Of late I have also been finding that the in-between is becoming a greater focus of concern in explaining the work we do. Many people in media archiving or preservation have likely run into the situation where someone says, “Well why don’t you just digitize it?” One starts with a reel of film or ¼” tape, and then one has a CD or DVD. Bingo bango bongo. Of course they don’t know about the whole process of assessing the content, parameters, and condition of the original; identifying reformatting options, desired outcomes/uses of reformatted materials, file-based preservation strategies, and how those decisions inform one’s selection of deliverables and vendors; and then performing quality control and scheduling periodic review/migration of preservation materials. These considerations are our realm and our work. I don’t exactly know how they get the crème in a Ding Dong; I just want to eat it.

These are the day-to-day kind of in-betweens we think about and deal with. Lots of important decisions to make, but nothing too surprising. However, the management of file-based assets has created a new set of concerns that archivists have to be aware of. More and more I’ve been hearing stories of activities that sound everyday enough, such as software upgrades and file transfers between servers, that go horribly awry. Upgrades are incompatible with older files or files created with a different software and those legacy files are corrupted or become inaccessible… Directory structures are changed during a migration or systems clean up and relationships or dependencies are lost… Important folders are not moved to a new server or are deleted during the application of a retention policy…

Archivists and collection managers must be aware of these issues, but they very often are not the people responsible for making the related decisions or implementing policies or equipment upgrades. Especially in larger organizations, systems can be part of a much larger networks that services many different departments. Collection management may just be a portion of overall systems management, which itself may be the realm of an IT department, or a higher level organizational manager, or a vendor / contractor hired to perform services. In these cases actions may be taken without consulting all levels of users, and the decision-makers may be acting on not the fullest amount of information or based on more broadly defined needs.

Preservation needs, however, are something different. Preservation goes against the natural order — it is the staving off of the processes of degradation and decay — and that also means, in a sense, going against the directional flow of an organization or certain technological shifts towards thelatestandgreatest in order to best maintain legacy materials in the face of constantly changing work plans or software / hardware versioning. Innovation and change certainly oughtn’t to be rejected out of hand, but caution can take a reasoned approach and play a role in effective advocacy — one of the other sides of the multi-faced die of collection management.

Advocacy itself takes many forms. I think what I’m trying to draw out here is that these forms include the cultivation of institutional awareness and relationships. Archives are often integrated into larger institutional budgets and structures, and are often perceived as a minor organizational piece. Two things here:

1. Archives have the potential to be major players in the fulfillment of organizational missions and goals across a wide array of departments.

2. Open awareness and communication with those other departments regarding their needs as well as how their policies or decisions will affect the longevity of archival materials is one of the keys to proactive, forward-looking collection management.

It is a foregone conclusion that a media collection is fairly useless without means to discovery and access. What cannot be found and viewed is, essentially, non-existent. Parallel to this truism is the fact that a collection which is invisible to its parent institution is bound to remain forgotten, unused, and unsupported. Making a collection findable through catalogs or finding aids is one step; making a collection findable through creating awareness and articulating its organizational value is equally important. The care taken in interactions between people and departments is as valuable as the care taken in migration between formats and storage devices. And I ain’t ya teasing here.

— Joshua Ranger

Touching Betamax

I believe that Congress passed a bill in 1992 stating that every article / news story / blog / etc that discusses audiovisual formats (and ‘format wars’ related therein) must, under penalty of law, mention how VHS won out over Betamax. I recently found this video for the song “Betamax” by the Filipino band Sandwich. It reminded me that, for the most part, the human point of view is narrowly focused. Not sure how I could be so short sighted and forget this truism, but there you go.

In the States, VHS won out as the popular format, and Betamax is lamented as the great whatcouldhavebeen of video freex everywhere… everywhere here. However, in other places, Betamax had a much stronger hold and is looked back on as the format of 80s nostalgia. To wit:

(Rough translation of the title lyrics: “Back then there was only Betamax” [i.e., things were much simpler back in the day])

Wala pa nung, indeed, my friends. Wala. pa. nung.

— Joshua Ranger

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