IASA-AMIA 2010 conference

Programme: 6th 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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Saturday, November 6, 2010

Time IASA IASAMIA AMIA AMIA
08:00-17:00 Registration
08:00-17:00 Vendor Exhibitions
08:30-09:00 Best Practices in the Preservation and Digitization of 78rpm Discs and Cylinder RecordingsBest Practices in the Preservation and Digitization of 78rpm Discs and Cylinder Recordings
This research reports on a 51-question online survey used to determine the best practices in use among archives, heritage institutions and commercial organizations that preserve and digitize instantaneous and commercial 78rpm phonographic discs and cylinder recordings. The survey addresses adherence to published standards, digitization procedures and physical storage conditions. Specifically, the variables include: types of equipment in use in digitization, transfer facility selection, formats for digitized recordings, practices associated with digitization, and the skill-level and number of staff performing physical preservation and digitization. The participants are archivists, librarians, audio engineers, project managers and consultants at institutions across North America and Europe, recruited from member directories of audio preservation associations archival audio list-servs. The results may interest audio archivists, as well as the commercial recording industry, both of whom benefit from a better understanding of how (and whether) current standards are being met and what practices are common in the field.
Aaron Rosenblum, Prof. Catherine Guastavino & Prof. Gordon Burr - McGill University
Century Store, Real Options, Real CostsCentury Store, Real Options, Real Costs
There is much discussion about preserving audiovisual content, ranging from freezing film to casting files into "the Cloud". There is also now enough information about competing options and technologies, and about use-cases, to make models of storage 'for a century' that are actually informative, allowing us to give substantial answers to these questions. This paper will present several basic 'century-store' usage models -- because the question needs to start with how the material is to be used during that century -- and then give the projected costs and benefits for a range of technology options. The answer to "What's best?" may still be "it depends" -- but this paper will explode some of the obviously wrong answers that have been circulating.
Dr Richard Wright - BBC Research and Development
Matthew Addis - IT Innovation, Univ of Southampton
Rajitha Weerakkody - BBC Research and Development
Panel Discussion: Case Studies in Managing Born-digital Media from Production to Access Panel Discussion: Case Studies in Managing Born-digital Media from Production to Access
This panel will explore the processes employed by three small non-profit organizations to manage digital media in a variety of formats from production to archiving and access. It will look at how archiving principles have been incorporated throughout the workflow, and discuss lessons we have learned along the way.
Chair: Yvonne Ng - WITNESS
Speakers: Natalia Fidelholtz - Storycorps
Nicole Martin - Democracy Now!
Walter Forsberg - NYU MIAP
Panel Discussion: Alternative Access: Recent Developments in Copyright LawPanel Discussion: Alternative Access: Recent Developments in Copyright Law
Knowledge of copyright law is essential when working with archival moving images. This panel aims to provide an overview of current movements in copyright advocacy that affect how archivists provide access to moving images. The panel's participants represent the leaders at the forefront of copyright scholarship and reform and their discussion will give archivists the resources to examine how they can use their collection in light of these current ways of thinking about copyright law.
Chair: David Pierce
Speakers: Michael W. Carroll - American University, Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property
Sherwin Siy - Public Knowledge
Kim Bonner - Center for Intellectual Property
09:00-09:30 Yet Another Tape Survey? Lessons Learned from ILKAR's Tape Survey Yet Another Tape Survey? Lessons Learned from ILKAR's Tape Survey
This paper critically discusses the condition survey of the tape collection recently carried out at the Ethnological Museum in Berlin in the course of the ILKAR project (Integrated Solutions for Preservation, Archiving and Conservation of Endangered Magnetic Tapes and Cylinders). The presentation will discuss methodological, procedural aspects and the results of the condition survey.
From the methodological perspective, differences in recent inspection methods, such as ISO 18933-2006 and Sound Direction's FACET will be discussed. From a procedural perspective, ILKAR's approach to tape type identification will be discussed and the results of the survey will be presented including a multi-factorial analysis which relates the observed state to different factors such as tape type, batch, age and, where possible, to the life history of the collections.
Maurice Mengel - Ethnological Museum, Berlin, Germany
Strategic Evaluation of Media Collections: The Indiana University Bloomington Media Preservation SurveyStrategic Evaluation of Media Collections: The Indiana University Bloomington Media Preservation Survey
Indiana University is responsible for more than 560,000 audio and video recordings and reels of motion picture film stored on its Bloomington campus. Most are analog and nearly all are actively deteriorating, some quickly and catastrophically. The vast majority are carried on formats that are either obsolete or will be within the next decade. Many of these recordings document subjects, events, people, or cultural heritage of enduring value to the university, the state of Indiana, the United States, and the world. Many archivists believe that there is a 1515-20 year window of opportunity to digitize analog audio and video, less for some formats. After that, the combination of degradation and obsolescence will make digitization either impossible or prohibitively expensive. The forces of degradation and obsolescence are converging on our generation for nearly all known media formats.
This presentation will explore Indiana University's response to this emerging reality for media holdings including the completion of a year-long preservation survey and a 132-page report. It will address survey procedures and findings including specific evidence of degradation as well as issues related to format obsolescence. It will also report on recommended next steps to address this crisis as well as the strategies employed by the University as it completes a second year-long project to plan a central preservation digitization facility and create a detailed campus-wide preservation plan.
Mike Casey - Indiana University
09:30-10:00 Workflows in From Right to Left and from Left to RightWorkflows in From Right to Left and from Left to Right
Since 2008 the Sound Archives of the National Library of Israel is working on preservation and providing access through digitization and cataloguing of its main collection. The collection is of Jewish and Israeli music recorded since the 1930s to 2008 which includes 30,000 hours of songs, prayers, instrumental tunes etc of various traditions mainly in Hebrew and other Jewish languages. The project is running in parallel workflows as it is funded by an American foundation that requires completion within four years. Therefore the first year focused on an in-house workflow (of records and born digital discs) as the second year has begun an outsourcing workflow, the third and fourth will focus on integrating and convergence of all into one center to provide preservation and access. In this presentation I will explore the workflows, their unique problems, and their solutions found at the National Library of Israel adopting IASA standards and collective experience. The entire project is conducted in Hebrew and English and the software in based on Ex Libris Aleph cataloguing system Dgitool and Primo DMM systems and Discovery systems. This is the largest project in Israel and it hopes to be a model for other archives in Israel and in the Middle East.
Dr Gila Flam - National Library of Israel
Rethinking Triage and Preservation of Analog Media CollectionsRethinking Triage and Preservation of Analog Media Collections
Archives and collectors of media facing deterioration from hydrolysis must contemplate a seemingly impossible choice - expend vast efforts and sums to restore and migrate the original media's content to digital or lose it. Bad experiences encouraged the notion that most analog media lasts only a few decades, triggering panic that an entire collection's content might be lost without significant action.
The shift to digital, combined with media problems and obsolete machine technology, prompts many to hastily migrate their media assets to digital. Sadly, "Do No Harm" conservation principles are sometimes neglected to expediently transfer content. Many collections discarded their original carriers, even those containing primary source materials - believing they were doomed by hydrolysis. Even more tragic is the growing awareness that digital media also has uncertain life expectancy, making it costly and unreliable for long-term preservation.
A scientific approach to triage, restoration, and preservation of original tape and film assets allows better planning, work flows, and cost savings. Hydrolysis is a common deterioration problem for many media formats, but is not always a death sentence. This presentation will introduce new work, backed by laboratory research, that shows many hydrolysis reactions can be reversed, hydrolysis by-products like sticky shed residue can be eliminated, and simple strategies allow collection owners to detect and control hydrolysis activity. Such strategies easily plug into workflow stages, so restoration and preservation work may be completed with calm clear-headed efficiency, greatly extending the lifespan of original media carriers far beyond that of their typical digital replacements.
Charles A. Richardson - Richardson’s Magnetic Tape Restoration LLC
10:00-10:30 COFFEE/TEA
10:30-11:00 The UK Sound Map: An Audio Crowdsourcing ExperimentThe UK Sound Map: An Audio Crowdsourcing Experiment
In 2009 the British Library sound archive began testing a field recording project for user-generated digital content. The UK Sound Map project represents a radical departure from the more traditional, curator-led professional archival practises that involve a drawn-out sequence beginning with acquisition, then formal accessioning, cataloguing, preservation and eventually, if funding and copyright terms allow, online access. The project instead uses an informal community of guided but untrained field recordists to capture environmental sounds with mobile phones, with near-instant public sharing on a dedicated website: in effect, using users as curators. The technical, legal and ethical implications arising from this 'publish first, archive later' model will be discussed. Future challenges include extending similar community archiving projects to other kinds of sounds while ensuring that what is collected is of sufficient quality to have lasting research value.
Richard Ranft - The British Library Sound Archive
Panel: Memory of the World - What's in it for me?Panel: Memory of the World - What's in it for me?
The UNESCO "Memory of the World" (MOW) Registers - international, regional and national - aim to highlight and recognise the outstanding documentary heritage of humanity - including the audiovisual heritage, which remains insufficiently represented. Inscription of a document or a collection on a register offers prestige and benefits to the institution concerned. Within the IASA and AMIA membership there are many MOW success stories. This session will explain the aims and processes of the MOW program, and panel members will offer case studies on the nomination process and the effect of successful outcomes for their own institutions.
Chair: Dietrich Schueller (Austria). Participants: Caroline Yeager (George Eastman House); Pam Wintle (Smithsonian Institute)
Panel Presentation: 3D Objects and Textiles in the Moving Image Collection: Issues and SolutionsPanel Presentation: 3D Objects and Textiles in the Moving Image Collection: Issues and Solutions
Why preserve a costume covered in stage blood? What do you do with artifacts made out of glues and plastics meant to last for a few months during production rather than 100 years of preservation? How do you safely store or exhibit these items? Why preserve eighty year old radio tubes? How do these artifacts preserve the history of film and television production? This session will discuss these questions and more.
Chair: Mary Huelsbeck - Black Film Center/Archive - Indiana University
Speakers: Deidre Thiemann - NBC Universal
Steve Wilson - Harry Ransom Humanities Research
Chuck Howell - University of Maryland
Panel Discussion: The Life and Times of Sigmund Lubin: King of the MoviesPanel Discussion: The Life and Times of Sigmund Lubin: King of the Movies
In early motion picture history we all know the names of such film pioneers, as Edison, Lumiere and Griffith, however may not be familiar with the name of Lubin. Lubin, is one Siegmund Lubin, born in Germany in the 1850s, and later moved to Philadelphia, where he established a thriving motion picture business and studio. The presentation will trace the growth of Lubin's film production enterprise as well as his personal evolution. Though at first regarded as a shameless pirate, Lubin became the first to vertically integrate the movie industry, taking on the roles of Producer, Director, Distributor, and Exhibitor, with equal enthusiasm. Emerging as one of the best-known figures in the film industry by 1910, he crowned himself the "King of the Movies." The session will also focus on Lubin's company within the larger context of other studio production, early cinema and the issues of early film piracy.
Chair: Bill Morrow - Footage File
Speakers: Jon Gartenberg - Gartenberg Media Enterprises
Joseph P. Eckhardt - Betzwood Film Archive
Peter Decherney - University of Pennsylvania
11:00-11:30 Is a Production Archive a Suitable Long-Term Archive?Is a Production Archive a Suitable Long-Term Archive?
It may seem like digital archive management (DAM) systems have become a commodity product among broadcast manufacturers, but the fact is that different DAM-type products serve different purposes. This paper distinguishes between production and long-term archives. While a production archive primarily automates and optimizes the production of new content, the long-term archive provides a wider range of functions to serve the entire broadcast enterprise. This includes preserving valuable content and information through quality controlled digitization processes, facilitating internal access to that content and information, and supporting the public good by providing flexible access methods to cultural heritage, fulfilling the convergence demand of the target audience. While the purpose of long-term archives has not changed that much over the decades, the process of digitization has brought new challenges and opportunities for the archive's operation.
The paper will describe how recent standards such as the Open Archive Information System (OAIS, ISO-standard 14721:2003) can be utilized to model a method to meet the access and preservation requirements of a long-term broadcast archive. Steps aiming at the processing and propagation of archive information units draw upon OAIS definitions, thus forming sustainable input and output methods. When interfaces to other business units, such as accounting, production and broadcasting, or specific metadata presentation layers are based on OAIS foundations, these may be abstracted from specific technical implementation and thus support the enterprise's long-term flexibility and efficiency. In presenting these principles, the author will draw on the examples of archival media asset management (MAM) systems deployed at public broadcasters and national archives in Europe and Latin America.
Jean-Christophe Kummer & Sebastian Gabler - NOA Audio Solutions
11:30-12:00 Telemeta, The Web Audio Archiving Program of the French Research Center of Ethnomusicology (CREM)Telemeta, The Web Audio Archiving Program of the French Research Center of Ethnomusicology (CREM)
The French Research Center of Ethnomusicology (CREM - LESC CNRS) is one of the greatest repository of audio archives in Europe, founded in 1932 by André Schaeffner. It preserves more than 5000 hours of historical recordings going back to 1900 and supports contemporary fieldwork. It includes commercial and unpublished records of traditional music from around the world, oral traditions and spoken words in numerous languages. The CREM, currently digitizing its collections, works on the documentation, preservation, and dissemination of its archives to a global audience.
This presentation will focus on Telemeta, the web audio (and video) archiving program developped for the CREM, introducing useful and secure methods to backup, index, transcode, analyse and publish digitalized audio file with its metadata. This online resource delivers easy and controled access to documented sounds from the collections of vinyls, magnetic tapes or audio CDs over a strong database, in accordance with open standards. It includes documentation, indexing and search capabilities (with GEO Navigator for audio geolocalization), and main features such as dynamical audioplayer, workflows, DublinCore compatibility, OAI-PMH data provider.
Aude Julien & Joséphine Simonnot - CREM (LESC UMR 7186 - CNRS)
12:00-14:00 LUNCH
14:00-14:30 Ethics and Moral Rights in the Converging World - Shubha Chaudhuri, India Visual Quality Analysis - an Archive Management ToolVisual Quality Analysis - an Archive Management Tool
A significant amount of work in film and video preservation is dedicated to quality assessment of the content to be archived or re-used in the case of content already stored in the archive. During ingest of content it is of interest whether content reaches defined quality criteria (e.g. image stability, focus, no freeze frames). For archive migration it is of interest whether the content quality is preserved after the transcoding step from the legacy to the new encoding (e.g. blocking). Quality analysis can be used to detect the best quality copy in the case that several copies of the same content are available within the archive. In archive exploitation it is of interest whether content quality is sufficient for a certain intended usage (e.g. resolution, image stability, or noise level) or to estimate the restoration costs to reach the needed quality level.
In this paper we provide recent results on automatic, content based visual quality analysis tools. We present research results for electronic and film grain noise level as well as dust level estimation, and furthermore for freeze frame and video breakup detection. In order to facilitate interoperability and exchange of impairment metadata between different tools and systems, a standardized way of description is needed. We give an overview on our framework proposed for the description of visual impairments based on MPEG-7. Furthermore, we present novel film and video impairment visualization and summarization techniques for efficient human exploration of visually impaired content. All these tools enable to improve the efficiency of archive related content management processes.
Peter Schallauer - Joanneum Research / Media Services AS
Panel Discussion: Black, Proud, Hidden, Lost: Accessing African American Media anel Discussion: Black, Proud, Hidden, Lost: Accessing African American Media
Outside of specifically curated collections, such as Indiana University's Black Film Center/Archive, significant holdings of African American moving image media may be hidden within larger archival collections. This session will focus on issues of access and marginalization of content often inherent in the cataloging, collection, and curation of Black moving images. Through the presentation of case studies, problems of "lost" materials, inadequate archival description, and the process of uncovering valuable collections will be explored.
Chairs: Jacqueline Stewart - Northwestern University, Dept. of Radio/Television/Film
Leah Kerr
Speakers: Mark Quigley - UCLA Film & Television Archive
Devorah Heitner - Lake Forest College
Panel Discussion: Transcoding 101: The Mechanics and Application of Digital Video Conversion Within the ArchivePanel Discussion: Transcoding 101: The Mechanics and Application of Digital Video Conversion Within the Archive
Unraveling digital audiovisual transcoding and the methodology of converting one form of encoding to another is pertinent to meeting the goals of access and preservation. Skip, Angelo and Dave will examine various transcoding utilities including commercial, free and open source tools in a panel that will analyze the strategies, challenges, and negotiations involved in efficiently providing access to audiovisual media collections. The presentation will consider the selection of codecs, tools and workflows to allow the archivist to control quality and loss while enabling new uses of content through transcoding. We'll look under the hood of software-based tools and applications, identifying what to look out for, how to evaluate lossless and lossy transcoding methods, verify results, and examining the relationship between the source and the results. The session will also highlight automation, quality control, metadata, access and delivery.
Chairs: Dave Rice - AudioVisual Preservation Solutions
Angelo Sacerdote - Bay Area Video Coalition
Speakers: Skip Elsheimer - AV Geeks
14:30-15:00 EB & Committee & Section Meeting
(members only)
EUscreen and European Film Gateway, the AV aggregators for EuropeanaEUscreen and European Film Gateway, the AV aggregators for Europeana
Europeana is the common access point to the collections of European libraries, archives, audiovisual archives and museums from all around Europe. By July 2010, Europeana will provide access to 10 million digitized objects from a wide variety of cultural heritage organisations. Experience gained during the work on the Europeana prototype launched in November 2008 shows that the direct integration of individual institutions is very complex and labor-intensive. Hence, a network of 'aggregator' projects has been put into place to solve domain-specific interoperability problems before contributing metadata to Europeana.
The two main aggregators in the audiovisual domain are EUscreen (television heritage) and the European Film Gateway. These projects have their own specificities with regards to content submission. They are collecting information and data that are more diverse than the Europeana specifications. Europeana deals mainly with issues surrounding accessibility of the content while these projects are also dealing with digitisation, providing guidelines for example on how to publish contents online, etc.
Johan Oomen (Netherlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid) & George Eckes (Deutsches Filminstitut)
15:00-15:30 A Sound Vision on Mass Digitisation: Quest for the Sweet Spot to Turn 17,500 Hours of Film into an AssetA Sound Vision on Mass Digitisation: Quest for the Sweet Spot to Turn 17,500 Hours of Film into an Asset
The paper describes the outcome of a recent study conducted by The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision that will be digitising 17,500 hours of archival film as part of the Images for the Future Project (2007-2014). Sound and Vision's standard definition (Digital Betacam) digitisation workflow needed to be replaced by a sensible High Definition digitisation workflow. The study focuses on determining the scanning, coding and possible compression parameters necessary to successfully digitize 17,500 hours of film for archiving purposes and to make it possible to access the material digitally. Building on the experience gained by two extensive pilot projects and research by Fraunhofer IIS, Sound and Vision was able to make the decisions necessary to plan a comprehensive digital film archiving program and workflow, which are outlined in the paper. Taking time as well as financial constraints into consideration, the study looks at Sound and Vision's decision to scan to uncompressed DPX files (HD 1440 * 1080 as well as 2K), to refrain from jpeg2000 or other image compression for the archival format and to opt for XDCAM HD 422 as the digital access format. Subjective and objective quality assessments are also described to corroborate the aforementioned decisions.
Tom De Smet (Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision)
15:30-17:00 General Assembly II
(members only)
  AMIA membership meeting
 
17:30-19:00 Joint Closing cocktail
19:00-late IASA Farewell Dinner
19:00-23:00 AMIA Restoration ScreeningAMIA Restoration Screening: On The Bowery
Lionel Rogosin’s style as an independent filmmaker was straightforward and compassionate. His films, made “from the inside” showed the subjects he chose in their normal surroundings and allowed them to speak in their own words. By choosing ordinary people caught up in universal problems — homelessness, racial discrimination, war and peace, labor relations, and poverty — Rogosin made his point poignantly. The Oscar®- nominated On the Bowery is a masterpiece of the American blend of documentary/fiction. On the Bowery chronicles three days on New York’s skid row, the Bowery. In the early part of the 19th century, it was an elegant place of large mansions and respectable theater. When the elevated trains came in, it covered the street in darkness and the Bowery soon became known as the place for low rents and cheap drinks. Film provided by Milestone Films. A limited number of tickets available for Conference attendees – pick up your ticket at the Registration Desk
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Session Chairs
  Session IASA IASAMIA
08:30-10:00 Session 1 Kurt Deggeller, Memoriav Matthew Davies, National Film and Sound Archive
10:30-12:00 Session 2 Drago Kunej, Scientific Research Centre SASA / Institute of Ethnomusicology Dietrich Schüller
14:00-14:30 Session 3 Judith Gray, American Folklife Center, Archive of Traditional Culture -
14:00-15:30 Session 4 - Kara van Malssen, Broadway Video Digital Media / NYU

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