IASA-AMIA 2010 conference

Programme: 4th November

Preliminary programme download (pdf icon Adobe PDF, 1.30 MB)
Note: this is subject to change. For the latest updates, please check the programme tables on this website and the bulletin board at the conference.

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To view abstracts below, move your mouse over a title

Thursday, November 4, 2010

Time IASA IASAMIA AMIA AMIA AMIA
08:00-17:00 Registration
08:00-17:00 Vendor Exhibitions
08:30-09:00 Audio Preservation for Surround Sound WorksAudio Preservation for Surround Sound Works
"New Music" by 21st-Century composers as well as surround-sound field recordings of musical performances and related events require innovations by audio archivists for digitization, storage, access, and delivery. This paper outlines the approach taken by Audio Preservation Services at Harvard University when the Loeb Music Library began to acquire rare and unique multi-channel electro-acoustic music for study and teaching by its musicology and composition faculty and students.
Institutional audio preservation activities typically involve working with mono or stereo materials. When Audio Preservation Services began accepting materials in multiple surround sound formats, it was necessary to examine our workflows to determine how to preserve audio works consisting of two, four and eight channel representations. This presentation looks at some of the issues that arose in the scaling of our preservation workflows. Topics addressed will include the transfer, monitoring, and documentation for the preservation of standard and non-standard multichannel audio configurations.
David Ackerman - Harvard College Library
Panel Presentation: Moving to a Digital Asset Management Environment: A Case Study on Fresh AirPanel Presentation: Moving to a Digital Asset Management Environment: A Case Study on Fresh Air
This panel will review the consolidation of metadata and media related to the production of Fresh Air, utilizing a digitization initiative, metadata conformance and digital asset management. Presenters will include the project manager from WHYY on managing in-house digitization and updates to production workflows. The panel will also include a consultant representing the metadata conformance aspects of the project to utilize PBCore to manage all scopes of production, rights, and asset management metadata. A representative from the digital asset management vendor will also present on designing and building an architecture and tools to consolidate all media and metadata to a common standards-based interface. The panel will encompass a variety of challenges and strategies utilize to bring media and metadata into the benefits of digital asset management while starting from a diverse set of legacy systems..
Chair: Dave Rice - AudioVisual Preservation Solutions
Speakers: Julian Herzfeld – WHYY
Daniel Pisarski - TelVue Corporation
Panel Presentation: Flashlights, Flatfoots, and Flanges: The National Archives Repatriates Films from an Abandoned LabPanel Presentation: Flashlights, Flatfoots, and Flanges: The National Archives Repatriates Films from an Abandoned Lab
In the National Archive system, the films are represented by two separate yet equally important groups; the archivists, who investigate records; and the preservation specialists, who safeguard the collections. These, are their stories. Take a ride along with the heroic souls on their journey to save, repatriate, preserve, and develop digitization practices for a large collection of abandoned government film. Feel the pressure, marvel at the discoveries, and enjoy the clips!
Chair: Criss Kovac - National Archives and Records Administration
Speakers: Heidi Holmstrom & Laurel Macondray - National Archives and Records Administration
Ed Carter - AMPAS
Panel Discussion: Home Movies and Ethnic HistoryPanel Discussion: Home Movies and Ethnic History
While most archivists and scholars would acknowledge that life cycle moments such as family and community celebrations are the most favored occasions for recording home movies, the second life of these images is never so simple, particularly when these images pertain to a particular ethnic community. Italian Americans comprise the fourth largest European ethnic group in the U.S., and while they assimilated into American mainstream and popular cultures, they also maintained close ties with their Italian roots. Over the past century, home movies increasingly became a way for Italian American home movie-makers to document both their own domestic lives as well as their connections to their Italian families. This panel will look at three archival preservation, access, interpretation and re-use projects that use Italian American home movies to show how amateur films can be used to reveal American ethnic and immigrant traditions.
Chair: Dwight Swanson - Center for Home Movies
Speakers: Regina Longo - University of California, Santa Barbara
Karianne Fiorini - Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia
Gina Carducci - Cineric, Inc.
The Digital Motion Picture Archive Framework Project: Managing Digital Motion Picture Materials for ArchivesThe Digital Motion Picture Archive Framework Project: Managing Digital Motion Picture Materials for Archives
The Digital Motion Picture Archive Framework Project is a multi-year collaborative effort to investigate and address key issues in long-term preservation of and access to digital motion picture materials. A partnership between the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and the U.S. Library of Congress' National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), this project builds upon earlier Academy research on digital preservation issues from the perspective of the major motion picture studios and large film archives.
Key topic areas for this presentation will be:
- Long-term digital preservation issues from the perspective of independent filmmakers, documentarians and nonprofit public archives. While 2007's "The Digital Dilemma" focused on these issues from the perspective of the major motion picture studios and large film archives, the issues are somewhat unique for those without the financial wherewithal of larger organizations.
- ACeSS (The Academy Case Study System for collection management and long-term storage of digital motion picture materials). ACeSS was developed to explore the system and operational requirements and process for managing digital motion picture materials in an archive setting. The discussion will include metadata schemas for digital motion picture materials, digital libraries and repositories, and distributed storage for digital motion picture materials.
- "Smart" cloud storage partner project with CineGrid, a global research community that focuses on high performance networking for media applications. The CineGrid Exchange, a distributed global media repository, uses ACeSS and iRODS (integrated Rule-Oriented Data System) for the storage, retrieval and management of high quality audiovisual assets.
- The Image Interchange Framework Project, a high performance motion picture imaging architecture designed with archiving master materials in mind. The Image Interchange Framework is a set of encoding specifications and transforms, now being standardized at SMPTE, that facilitates a wide range of motion picture workflows while eliminating the ambiguity of today's file formats
Chair: Andy Maltz - Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences; Speakers: Dana Plepys - University of Illinois at Chicago and CineGrid; Milt Shefter - Miljoy, Inc. and Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences; Seth Kaufman - Whirl-i-Gig, Inc. and CineGrid; Karen Barcellona - Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences; Jeffrey Weekley - Naval Postgraduate School and CineGrid
09:00-09:30 Video Digitization at the Austrian MediathekVideo Digitization at the Austrian Mediathek
In Autumn 2009 the Austrian Mediathek startet a 3 years lasting project, in which about 2000 video recordings of different formats should be digitized. This was the initial moment to make decisions about an archival format to be used for long term preservation. The few existing solutions showed to be insufficient for the whole workflow including extraction back from the archive and converting to any format. At least we decided to combine open source applications in self made scripts to meet the needs of professional and well documented workflows. This presentation is an overview of our solution (ingest stations, automatisms, documentation etc.), which should be running in hardcore use from September 2010.
Hermann Lewetz - Österreichische Mediathek
09:30-10:00

Negotiating Culture in the World of RiverdanceNegotiating Culture in the World of Riverdance
Irish cultural expression takes many forms, from the solo fireside singer of antiquity to the global multimedia phenomenon of touring stage shows. Contemporary participants find themselves somewhere in the middle of these aesthetics, treading a line between tradition and innovation, between participation and performance. From these boundaries emerge a constant and spirited conversation between the creators, consumers and curators of a culture. This ongoing conversation takes many forms: the negotiation of cultural expansion takes place on the stage of adjudication, while negotiation for recognition takes place in the social web of reputation. Negotiation for access takes place in the language of intellectual property, and the negotiation of dissemination is sited within newly de-regionalised online networks.
An Archive of indigenous cultural materials has the potential to straddle all of these negotiation boundaries, and to influence the power relationships involved. Using examples from the Comhaltas Irish Traditional Music Archive, this paper looks at the ways in which the decisions taken by an archive can draw energy from and feed back into the ongoing negotiation of cultural identity. For a living tradition, the classic archival tension between preservation and access is more than just a theoretical problem, but instead a vital question for the evolution of a shared memory.
Breandán Ó Nualltáin - Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann

10:00-10:30 COFFEE/TEA
10:30-11:00 Administrative Metadata for Audio Preservation: The AES Standard and Software ToolsAdministrative Metadata for Audio Preservation: The AES Standard and Software Tools
Metadata is an integral component of digital preservation and an essential part of the digital audio object. Audio files without appropriate metadata are not understandable, interpretable, or manageable. Effectively, there is no preservation or meaningful access without metadata. The Sound Directions project at Harvard University and Indiana University has served as a testing ground for the forthcoming administrative (technical and digital provenance) metadata standards from the Audio Engineering Society. This presentation will provide an overview of AES 57 which is a technical metadata standard due for public release shortly. It will also introduce a digital provenance standard with the internal AES working title "X098C" which is in an advanced stage of development. In addition, this session will feature a demonstration of an open source metadata collection software tool that meets these standards. This software-named the Audio Technical Metadata Collector (ATMC)-was developed at Indiana University and is due for public release at the end of 2010. ATMC, which has a full graphical user interface, enables efficient metadata collection both manually and through automated processes as appropriate. Harvard University will also demonstrate its metadata tools which also support the AES standards. This session will be presented by Harvard's David Ackerman, who leads the AES working group developing these standards, and Indiana's Mike Casey, who guides the development of ATMC.
Mike Casey - Indiana University & David Ackerman - Harvard University
A Workflow Engine's PREMIS OWL binding for Digital Long-Term PreservationA Workflow Engine's PREMIS OWL binding for Digital Long-Term Preservation
A lot of cultural heritage institutions face the obligation to preserve their digital objects for the long-term. In Belgium, a distributed platform will be developed conform the OAIS reference model to cope with the technical and organisational challenges, inherent to digital long-term preservation. This platform elaborates on a layered, semantic metadata model, which is responsible for minimising the risks of digital long-term preservation. This model is based on Dublin Core, holding the descriptive metadata, and the preservation standard PREMIS 2.0, which holds the preservation metadata. For this, PREMIS defines four interrelated classes: Objects, offering a technical description of the digital objects, Events, describing all the events altering an object, Rights, describing the rights of an object, and Agents, which trigger events on objects or hold rights for an object. This model must be used in combination with preservation strategies, which ensures the accessibility of the digital objects for the future. These preservation strategies consist of several workflows for each file format, accepted by the preservation platform. These workflows put the digital object on a trajectory of certain actions, like validation, virus checking, normalisation, ingest, migration, emulation, etc., to ensure the future access to the digital object. These actions can be modelled perfectly as PREMIS events. For this reason, we made a binding of our workflow engine, which executes the preservation strategies, to our developed metadata model. This way, the workflow engine can be used in any digital repository turning it into a digital long-term archive, assuring the digital preservation.
Chair: Sam Coppen, Erik Mannens & Rik Van De Walle - Multimedia Lab - IBBT - Gent
Panel Discussion: Opening the Archives for Access: Understanding Copyright BarriersPanel Discussion: Opening the Archives for Access: Understanding Copyright Barriers
To ensure the continued relevancy of archival material archivists must work to increase access to moving images. However, they must do so with an awareness of the laws that regulate various channels of exhibition, distribution and re-use. In particular, the rights for reuse and distribution of older materials are often unclear. Panelists from the WGBH Legal Department, Harvard Law School / Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Center for Social Media at American University will discuss three ongoing projects that address this challenge and will report out on current copyright issues and best practices for archival media materials.
Chair: Karen Cariani - WGBH Media Library & Archives
Speakers: Sue Kantrowitz - WGBH Educational Foundation
Christopher Bavitz - Cyberlaw Clinic, Harvard Law School / Berkman Center
Patricia Aufderheide - Center for Social Media at American University
Roundtable Discussion: User Perspectives in the Digital Age ChairsRoundtable Discussion: User Perspectives in the Digital Age Chairs
This session's focus aims to inform archival moving image archivists and collection managers about evolving user perspectives and needs in the Digital Age. A roundtable discussion will include academics, students, filmmakers, and licensing researchers detailing diverse research methodologies and suggest areas to strengthen existing access models of onsite and online collection resources. Participants/patrons will informally address the impact of online resources on research (such as YouTube) and barriers to access (use restrictions, fees, uncataloged collections, etc.).
: Melissa Dollman - Schlesinger Library/Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University
Mark Quigley - UCLA Film & Television Archive
Speakers: Louis Massiah - Scribe Video Center
John Pettit - Urban Archives - Temple University Libraries
Frances McElroy - Shirley Road Productions
Sandra Gibson, NYU MIAP Program
Whitney Strub, Rutgers University-Newark
Elena Gorfinkel, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Adrian Wood, UK Producer/researcher
11:00-11:30 Panel Discussion: IASA’s Future and the Constitution Chair: Richard Green - IASA Immediate Past President Panel Discussion: New Attraction: PBCore 2.0Panel Discussion: New Attraction: PBCore 2.0
There are a number of metadata standards being used by the library and archival community. However, few are adequate and easy for describing media collections. PBCore is a metadata standard that was developed specifically to describe media, and many in the moving image archival community have begun to utilize it. After two years of a development hiatus, a new initiative has launched to continue development of the standard to bring it to PBCore 2.0. This session will give an overview of PBCore - why it is a good standard to use for media collections and the work done to bring it to PBCore 2.0. The session will demo and tour the new redesigned PBCore.org website highlighting changes, navigation, and the community input features. And finally there will be several case studies showing practical use of PBCore in real archive projects, followed by a roundtable discussion to get more feedback from the AMIA/IASA community.
Chair: Courtney Michael - WGBH Media Library & Archives
Speakers: Dave MacCarn - WGBH Educational Foundation
Courtney Michael - WGBH Educational Foundation
Jack Brighton - University of Illinois
11:30-12:00
12:00-14:00 LATIN AMERICA NETWORK / LUNCH
14:00-14:30 Large Scale DAT-to-File Ingest and Annotation of Radio Programmes: The Path Chosen at the Flemish Public Broadcaster VRTLarge Scale DAT-to-File Ingest and Annotation of Radio Programmes: The Path Chosen at the Flemish Public Broadcaster VRT
Digital Audio Tapes, commonly known as DAT, are of huge importance to audiovisual heritage, since big parts of the audio archives of radio stations in the nineties were stored on this kind of support. Recording quality was very high and a lot of broadcasters bought at least some DAT-players and recorders. Compared to DAT, the recording quality of magnetophone tape may be lower, their conservation quality has turned out to be much higher. The conclusion should be that compared to magnetophone tape, younger types of digital supports are far more threatened with degradation. The importance of this paper is in the fact that a lot of sound archives, often broadcaster's archives, cope with this problem, but that only of few large ones have elaborated a real strategy for it and have begun their DAT-to-file ingest. In this paper I wish to present the strategy developed and used in practice by VRT, the public broadcaster of the Flemish community in Belgium. After some words about the history of DAT and about our own collection, I will explain the selection criteria used for VRT's digitisation project and the workflow we elaborated and implemented. Part of this are some notable choices about the ingest and the annotation processes that maybe could inspire others. I conclude with some lessons learnt and our workflow scheme.
Brecht Declercq - VRT
Panel: Embedded Metadata: A Look Inside Issues and ToolsPanel: Embedded Metadata: A Look Inside Issues and Tools
This presentation explores recent studies and advancements focusing on embedded metadata, or metadata that is stored in the file itself. While this session is audio-centric, we believe that these studies and advancements lay the foundation for work to be performed addressing similar needs in the video domain. Chris Lacinak will present the findings of an ARSC Technical Committee study on the interchange and persistence of embedded metadata within and across prevalent audio software applications used in audio preservation workflows. David Rice will present on BWF MetaEdit, a free, open-source tool developed by the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative supported by AudioVisual Preservation Solutions. This tool represents a major advancement in singular and batch embedding, editing, and exporting of metadata in Broadcast WAVE Format (BWF) files. This tool can also enforce metadata guidelines developed by the Federal Agencies Audio-Visual Working Group, as well as recommendations and specifications from the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Microsoft, and IBM. George Blood will speak about MetaChecker, a tool for performing automated metadata quality control through comparative analysis of embedded metadata and an external document. The tool utilizes JHOVE and integrates with BWF MetaEdit, enabling high efficiency and accuracy.
Chris Lacinak - AudioVisual Preservation Solutions
Dave Rice - AudioVisual Preservation Solutions
George Blood - George Blood Audio
Panel Presentation: : Wrappers and Codecs: A Survey of Selection StrategiesPanel Presentation: : Wrappers and Codecs: A Survey of Selection Strategies
This session will consult some of the leading thinkers in the field to help answer one of the most widely asked questions in archives today: What preservation master file format should I use for digitizing analog video? Three case studies will be presented that will walk the audience through the decision making process, address the special considerations specific to each organization, and relate final outcomes when answering this question. Carl Fleischhauer will represent the Federal Agencies Audio-Visual Working Group and their project to document target formats for digital video preservation, focusing here on the MXF wrapper and on JPEG 2000 and uncompressed picture encodings. Isaiah Beard will discuss selection of AVI Uncompressed as part of the recommendations for the Rutgers Community Repository. Hannah Frost will discuss the decision making process behind the selection of QuickTime Uncompressed for the Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources Preservation Lab.
Chair: Chris Lacinak - AudioVisual Preservation Solutions
Speakers: Carl Fleischhauer - Library of Congress
Isaiah Beard - Rutgers University
Hannah Frost - Stanford University
Help, My Camera's Burning DownHelp, My Camera's Burning Down
Eighty-six year-old independent filmmaker Carson Davidson has made a remarkably eclectic body of work spanning areas such as transportation (the Oscar-nominated "Third Avenue El"), Dadaism, and industrial and medical subjects. In this session, he describes his work and the realities of independent filmmaking, and shows several of his films. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Brain Meacham will screen a Davidson film recently restored by the Academy, in a session moderated by Geoff Alexander.
: Carson Davidson's Far-Flung Cinema Chair: Geoff Alexander - Academic Film Archive of North America
Speakers: Brian Meacham - Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Carson Davidson - Carson Davidson Films
14:30-15:00 Migration of digital media storage - practical experiencesMigration of digital media storage - practical experiences
A growing number of audiovisual archives are in the process of transferring their collections into the form of digital essence files. Modern information technology can enable practically eternal life for this kind of digitised collections. However, the storage devices that are used to store digital essence files are far from long lasting and tend to require renewal of used storage device or medium at intervals of five to ten years. In order to successfully survive multiple migrations followed one by another each organisation must recognize both the technical and non-technical key issues that affect the result of migration. The result of migration operation can be successful and produce a bit-by-bit digital copy of the original material - or the migration can reveal that part of archived essence files can not be processed at all. The paper explains the basics of migration process, lists key issues that must be addressed while planning and executing migration, and describes the phases and results of first storage medium migration of Finnish Broadcasting Company's Digital Radio Archive.
Jouni Frilander - Finnish Broadcasting Company
15:00-15:30 HathiTrust and the challenge of digital audioHathiTrust and the challenge of digital audio
The HathiTrust shared digital repository was created with the mission to contribute to the common good by collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, and sharing the record of human knowledge. With a collection of over 5.5 million digitized monographs totaling 205 terabytes, HathiTrust is steadily growing to fulfill this mission.
HathiTrust has created policy and practices that ensure the long-term preservation and usability of the digital materials in the repository. However, these have been focused primarily on digital images. The University of Michigan has begun work on extending its capabilities to manage digital audio materials and preserve them over the long-term. The motivation for this work has been the development of a digital audio pilot project. A number of analog materials are being digitized for preservation and access, and HathiTrust is the most appropriate place for them to be stored. Adding new digital media formats to HathiTrust is not a straightforward task - it requires developing new ingest methods, using new metadata schemas, creating new structures for digital objects, and developing ways to display these items to users. Managing changes to the repository is a complex task - HathiTrust's scale demands high levels of consistency and reliability, but it must also adapt to ingest new materials when necessary.
Shane Beers & Bria Parker - University of Michigan
15:30-16:00 COFFEE/TEA
16:00-16:30 3:45 PM: IASA Institutional Visit: George Blood Audio/Safe Sound Archive (registration required)George Blood Audio/Safe Sound Archive
Depart Loews Hotel 3:45 (Valet Entrance on 12th street), return by 6PM.
Safe Sound Archive/George Blood Audio/Video is a leading provider of preservation digitization of audio and video. Come see 2,000 lb video machines and 40 terabytes of RAID5 data storage; hear the difference between 96kHz/24bit and 44.1kHz/16 bit in a $100,000 listening room and see how 200 concurrent projects are managed; see tape storage that passively cures Sticky Shed Syndrome and meet the smiling elves that perform all this magic!
Tour Guides: George Blood & Staff
  Panel Discussion : Termite TV: Mapping Media ConsciousnessPanel Discussion : Termite TV: Mapping Media Consciousness
This session explores Philadelphia-based Termite TV's collective creation and distribution of experimental, new media and socially interactive works. Since 1992 its diverse directors have produced innovative programming worldwide. Founders and producers will screen and discuss excerpts from their "Walk Philly" and "Life Stories" projects. As a real-time companion piece to this session attendees are invited on their interactive walking tour of Philadelphia via their "Walk Philly" website using their ipods or iphones.
Chair: Rebecca Bachman - NYU, Department of Cinema Studies
Speakers: Sara Zia Ebrahimi - Termite TV/Flickering Light Films
Michael Kuetemeyer - Termite TV Co-director /Temple University
Laska Jimsen - Termite TV Board/Temple University
Panel Discussion: Applied Color: Restored, Revived, RevisitedPanel Discussion: Applied Color: Restored, Revived, Revisited
History suggests that tinting, toning and other applied color became out-fashioned by the mid-1920s, however, forms of applied color were used more widely well into the 30s and 40s than generally known. In silent cinema, preservation of color has become quite common, but often falls short of matching the subtlety or vibrancy of the rarely revived original recipes. In this panel, applied color and its sporadic re-emergence in both film history and preservation will be discussed.
Chairs: Ulrich Ruedel - Haghefilm Foundation
Daniela Currò - Haghefilm Foundation
Speakers: Anthony L'Abbate - George Eastman House
Sean Kelly - The University of Amsterdam
16:30-17:00
17:00-17:30
 
17:30-18:30 AMIA MEETING
19:30-22:00 Fourth Annual Trivia Throwdown!Fourth Annual Trivia Throwdown!
Test your skills, win prizes and see if you can be the team that unseats the current AMIA Trivia Champions. Are you game? Sign up now! Everyone is welcome. Sign up as a team or as an individusal player. And remember that it's for a good cause! Funds go to support AMIA Awards programs - including the Silver Light, the Maryann Gomes and the Carolyn Hauer awards.
22:00-23:00 Screening/Session: A History of The Secret Cinema: A Curator's Compendium of Strange CinemaScreening/Session: A History of The Secret Cinema: A Curator's Compendium of Strange Cinema
For nearly 20 years Philadelphia's Secret Cinema curator Jay Schwartz has single handedly screened hundreds of 16mm film programs showcasing animation, archival, avant garde, cult, independent, industrial, musical, medical, and many lost local films documenting the stranger side of Philadelphia history. From early micro cinema forays in punk rock clubs to his 13 year stint at the Moore College of Art and Design this "floating repertory" film series has become Philadelphia's best known offbeat film program. Schwartz talks about the history of Secret Cinema, his alternative visions of cinema genres and how private collections play a important role in cinema history. He will introduce a collection of films in multiple genres- from quirky curiosities to locally produced films to musical and novelty shorts. Films include: "Invisible Diplomats", (1965), "The Story of Bubblegum" (1952), "The Korla Pandit Show" (1949), rare 1960s French Scopitones- juke box musical films and much more.

Chair: Stephen Parr - San Francisco Media Archive/Oddball Film +Video

 

Session Chairs
  Session IASA IASAMIA
08:30-10:00 Session 1 Nadja Wallaszkovits, Phonogramarchiv Dave Rice
10:30-12:00 Session 2 Kevin Bradley, National Library of Norway / Richard Green, Library and Archives Canada Courtney Michael
14:00-15:30 Session 3 Albrecht Häfner, special IASA rep. Chris Lacinak

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