AMIA/IASA 2010 Joint Conference
Wednesday - November 3
Preliminary Program
Subject to ChangeMonday.. | .Tuesday.. | .. Wednesday .. | .. Thursday .. | .. Friday .. |.. Saturday
Print the Preliminary Program [PDF]8:30am - 5:00pm - Separate Registration Fee Required
Workshop: Cataloging and Metadata for Moving Images [Day Two]
Chair: Karen Barcellona - Academy Film Archive
Speakers: Andrea Leigh - Library of Congress
Linda Tadic - Audiovisual Archive Network
Amy Lucker - New York University
Rebecca S. Guenther - Library of Congress
Randal Luckow - Turner Broadcasting
Janis L. Young - Library of Congress
Nancy Goldman - Pacific Film Archive Library & Film Study Center
Grace Agnew - Rutgers University Libraries
Jane Otto - Rutgers University LibrariesA two-day workshop providing an overview of cataloging practices, content standards, and metadata schemas used in describing digital and analog materials in all media environments. Sessions will focus on management of resources through their life cycles; the differences between descriptive, structural, and administrative metadata (including rights and preservation metadata); an introduction to the use of file wrappers with examples from the broadcast industry; and a discussion of the role of the librarian in digital asset management. Sense will be made of the alphabet soup that includes FRBR, MARC, DC, MODS,METS, PREMIS, FIAT, IPTC, MPEG7, MPEG21, MXF, RDA, FIAF, CEN, DACS, and EAD. Sessions will include dynamic presentations encompassing film, video, digital, and broadcast materials with interactive exercises and clips. A special half-day hands-on session will focus on thesauri available for genre/form headings and an overview of the integration of genre/form terms into Library of Congress Subject Headings.
8:30am - 12:30pm -Separate Registration Fee Required
Chair: Rachel Parker - Library of Congress
Speakers: Robert Smith - CARGOpak Corp.
Fulfill your nitrate film packing and shipping training requirement while at this years AMIA conference! Nitrate film is classified as a hazardous material and the regulations of packing and shipping it are very strict. This half day workshop will provide attendees with all the relevant regulatory information to be able to pack and ship nitrate film. It is a goal of the Nitrate Committee to have this workshop available every two years at the AMIA conference to provide an inexpensive option for this training. Here is a chance to train new employees or to renew your existing DG/hazmat training without incurring the cost of a personal training session or webinar. The class is exclusively about Nitrocellulose film shipping, only UN1324 in a half day workshop.
8:30am - 10:30pm
IASA General Assembly I
10:45am - 12:00pm
Welcome to IASA/AMIA 2010 & Keynote Speaker:
Before Convergence Was Divergence: Putting Humpty Dumpty Together AgainWelcomes: Kevin Bradley - IASA
Wendy Shay - AMIAKeynote: Anthony Seeger - UCLA
Transnational databases and the digitization of content have enabled libraries, archives, museums, commercial companies, and individuals to create bundles of information that look very similar and open the possibilities for the kinds of convergences raised in the call for papers for this conference. Convergences create opportunities; they sometimes create "perfect storms" that leave all adrift. In this presentation I will look at this issue from the perspective of human events, fragments of which are lodged in audio archives, film archives, museums, and the minds of individuals. Similarly to the egg-shaped Humpty Dumpty-whose fall, recounted in a famous English nursery rhyme and further developed in Lewis Carroll's Alice Through the Looking Glace, resulted in myriad pieces that "all the kings horses and all the kings men could not put together again"-since the late 1800s actual human events have been splintered into audio, visual, textual, and artefactual pieces and carried off to their respective archival institutions by a king's army of collectors. Some of the pieces haven't been gathered at all - notably olfactory, physical touch, and ecological ties of diverse events to one another. As a contribution to our discussion of convergence, this paper will look at one or two "total" events and discuss what it would take to have them whole again, and what this suggests for our archival and research convergences.
1:00pm - 5:30pm -Separate Registration Fee Required
The Reel Thing XXVI Technical SymposiumChairs: Grover Crisp - Sony Pictures
Michael Friend - Sony PicturesDedicated to presenting some of the latest technologies employed in film restoration and preservation, The Reel Thing features a unique lineup of laboratory technicians and specialists.
1:30pm - 3:00pm
Paper: The Future of Indigenous Archives: Opportunities of archival access in an information society
Speaker: Teague Schneiter-Todd - Isuma TV
This paper explores the possibilities and risks of web-accessible archival technologies for indigenous cultural heritage. The recent emergence of what Manuel Castells and Jan Van Dijk call information or network societies, has created a paradigm shift for cultural institutions such as audiovisual archives in the way that they make their collections accessible in favor of creating more user-oriented and openly accessible collections via web interfaces. When it comes to indigenous media-because of epistemological differences of indigenous cultures in the way knowledge and culture are managed and disseminated-our society's emphasis on access, bring up conceptual challenges of safety, security, and indigenous intellectual property differences. At the same time, changes in network technologies and media-sharing open up opportunities for indigenous communities to have a stake in the creation of community platforms and enhanced understanding of archival material by using user-created metadata. Because the concept of indigenous archiving on indigenous terms is still burgeoning, the knowledge and criticality needed to make indigenous material equitably accessible (which on the web reaches various user communities) is not widespread within the field of audiovisual archiving. This thesis endeavors to analyze the concept of cultural ownership when it comes to indigenous cultural heritage in an information/network society. Using contemporary theory on archives and access, indigenous intellectual property, and information and communication studies writings on user-oriented design, current manifestations of 'indigenous archives' are analyzed. The aims and implications of this analysis are to further develop a dialogue between moving image archivists, indigenous groups and knowledges, and the interested publics of indigenous media, including but not limited to indigenous user communities, in order to make use of the current paradigm of sharing and collaboration to benefit wider and more culturally/epistemologically sensitive access to indigenous collections.
Paper: Ethics of Digital Intervention: Image, Sound, Motion
Speaker: Prof. Paul Conway, University of Michigan, School of InformationThe digitization of the fragile media upon which a century of audiovisual resources resides is fundamentally a process of human intervention, supported partly by a suite of technological tools and, in some cases, emerging international standards suggesting the shape of the final product. Human decision making processes that underlie image digitization, audio re-recording, and motion picture reconstruction have much in common, in spite of the fact that decades of research and advocacy literature is rarely cross-informed. This paper is grounded in an emerging theory of the ethics of digital intervention and the ethical rights of information objects, pioneered by an international cadre of scholars of ethics and information technology. The paper explores the threads of a rich tapestry covering the ethical considerations involved in media digitization across three audiovisual domains: still images, audiotape, and motion picture film. The paper will expose the ethical implications of digital transformation, pointing toward a synthesis that suggest how archivists, curators, and technologists should define and specify digitization processes for a wide variety of sound and motion picture resources. The presentation will illustrate the key points by drawing on the results of dozens of digitization projects completed in the past decade. The paper concludes with a discussion of the importance of technological transparency in documenting the assumptions about the nature of the products produced in digitization programs.
Paper: Preservation and access of CPDOC's Oral History Program
Speaker: Marco Dreer Buarque - Getulio Vargas Foundation's Center for Research and Documentation of Brazilian Contemporary History (CPDOC/FGV)Founded in 1975, the Oral History Program of the Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil (CPDOC - Center for Research and Documentation of Brazilian Contemporary History) of Fundação Getulio Vargas holds more than 5,000 hours of recorded audio interviews. Until the 1990's, the recording technology adopted for the Program was all analogical based, consisting in cassettes and reel-to-reel formats. In the year of 2008, CPDOC started a digitization project to preserve and give access to the oral history interviews. So, a Digital Mass Storage System (DMSS) was introduced, as the best technical solution to preserve and, at the same time, to give access to the collection. CPDOC was pioneer in Brazil in introducing an oral history methodology. Then we can assert that maybe CPDOC is being pioneer for the second time, now introducing the first experience in Brazil by using a DMSS system in a historical institution. In the beginning of the 2000's CPDOC also began to record the Oral History interviews in video format. This paper will present a case study on the details of the preservation and the access of the CPDOC's collection afforded by the digitization project as well as the concerns related to the introduction of the video camera on the recording of the interviews.
3:30pm - 5:00pm
Paper: 'What We Believe We Are, Say We Are and Demonstrate We Are' - A Quantitative Analysis of the Attitudes of Audiovisual Archivists
Speaker: Tim Bathgate - Radio New Zealand Sound Archives
In the September 1964 issue of the American Journal of Sociology, Howard Wilensky wrote "Many occupations engage in heroic struggles for professional identification; few make the grade".
Indeed, the struggle for professional identification is not at all peculiar to audiovisual archivists: for 30 years now, contributors to the IASA Journal have discussed the 'professional sound archivist' in concrete terms, as if the existence of such a figure is patently undeniable.
Still, our literature confesses that, outside of our own clique, our claim to a professional status is largely unrecognised. It is thought that, unlike our vocational cousins - librarianship, traditional archival science, and museology - audiovisual archiving is yet to be recognised by the public as a genuine profession. At best, we are seen as a branch of archival science; at the very worst, we are probably seen as hoarders of trivia.
Unfortunately, we have very little concrete evidence to support any claim to a professional status. Although progress has been made to establish a professional framework - complete with training curricula, accreditation, codes of ethics and specialist literature - the efficacy of this framework cannot be defined unless we have some understanding of what the 'professional' audiovisual archivist is right now, and what it needs to become.
This research represents a foray into our present standing. To quantify our standing, a popular sociology instrument has been adopted and applied to members of IASA and AMIA to measure the disposition of audiovisual archivists, and whether there are any shortcomings in that disposition that might inhibit professionalisation.
Paper: Iqaluit Rocks! How the CBC's Virtual Music Library has changed broadcasting across Canada
Speaker: Nicole Blain - Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
Iqaluit, capital of the territory of Nunavut in the Canadian Arctic, has the best record collection in country. As does Halifax, Winnipeg, Vancouver, and every other CBC location. Canada's national public broadcaster launched Phase 1 of its Virtual Music Library (VML) in April 2009. The VML allows online access to the largest music collection in the country. Programmers can listen, download and transfer various audio file formats. It is available in two official languages, across six time zones, from any desktop within the CBC network. This paper will discuss the CBC's decision to move towards an in-house online music database and digitize its own collection, how it has changed and converged both library and production workflows, as well as the challenges involved and the obstacles that lay ahead. It will also look at the impact of the changing nature of broadcasting as well as the record industry. As of July 2010, the VML had over 800,000 tracks available online, and continues to grow.
Paper: The Matilda Discography
Speaker: Graham McDonald - National Film & Sound Archive of Australia
Waltzing Matilda is Australia's national song (as distinct from its national anthem). The story, in four short verses, is on an itinerant rural worker who steals a sheep and drowns himself rather than be taken in by the police. Written in 1895, the song struck an immediate chord with the Australian public, and since its first recording in 1926, has been recorded over 600 times. Through over 80 years of recordings the history of the Australian recording industry, both stylistically and technically, can be traced through this one song.
This then is the story of creating an annotated single song discography, the challenges of designing a database to list the recordings and how sound archivists might benefit from such work.
Also on offer is a 1985 7 minute clay-animation film (on a 35mm print) that tells the story of the song, and winner that year of the Australian Film Institute award for best short film.
6:00pm - 7:30pm
It's opening night, and a chance to say hello to colleagues, meet new friends and get ready for the days ahead.8:00pm - Separate Registration Fee Required
Tour: An Evening at Eastern State PenitentiaryIn addition to the Penitentiary, the tour will also include a screening inside an actual prison cell of the film "Release" by Bill Morrison, with the filmmaker in attendance. Opened in 1829 as part of a controversial movement to change the behavior of inmates through "confinement in solitude with labor," Eastern State Penitentiary quickly became one of the most expensive and most copied buildings in the young United States. Until its closure in 1971, it housed inmates such as Al Capone, Freda Frost, Slick Willie Sutton, and Morris Bolber. Also screened will be an 8minute silent film created at the prison in 1929. Eastern State Penitentiary is a short cab ride from the hotel.
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