AMIA/IASA 2010 Joint Conference
Thursday - November 4
Preliminary Program
Subject to ChangeMonday.. | .Tuesday.. | .. Wednesday .. | .. Thursday .. | .. Friday .. |.. Saturday
Print the Preliminary Program [PDF]8:30am - 4:30pm
VENDOR CAFE & AMIA SHORT FILM VIEWING AREA
Please join us for the always informative vendor exhibits! It's a great place to meet vendors and talk to colleagues.
9:00am - 12:00pm
The Digital Motion Picture Archive Framework Project
Chair: Andy Maltz - Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Sci-Tech Council
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.
8:30am - 10:00am
Session of Three Papers
Paper: Audio Preservation for Surround Sound Works
Speaker: David Ackerman - Harvard College Library
"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.
Paper: Video Digitization at the Austrian Mediathek
Speaker: Hermann Lewetz - Österreichische 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.
Paper: Negotiating culture in the world of Riverdance
Speaker: Breandán Ó Nualltáin - Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann
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.
8:30am - 10:00am
Chair: Chris Lacinak - AudioVisual Preservation Solutions
Speakers: Carl Fleischhauer - Library of Congress
Isaiah Beard - Rutgers University
Hannah Frost - Stanford UniversityThis 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.
8:30am - 10:00am
The National Archives Repatriates Films from an Abandoned LabChair: Criss Kovac - National Archives and Records Administration
Speakers: Heidi Holmstrom - National Archives and Records Administration
Laurel Macondray - National Archives and Records Administration
Ed Carter - AMPAS
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!8:30am - 10:00am
Chair: Dave Rice - AudioVisual Preservation Solutions
Speakers: Daniel Pisarski - TelVue Corporation
Julian Herzfeld - WHYYSince 1975 WHYY's production, Fresh Air, has generated thousands of 1/4" analog reels, DAT tapes, CDs, and digital files as well as even more Microsoft Word and Excel documents reflecting a disconnected set of rights, inventory, descriptive, and technical information. This panel looks at all aspects of an initiative to assemble Fresh Air's metadata collections under PBCore while bringing digital media and metadata into a production-oriented digital asset management system
10:30am - 11:00am
Speaker: Sam Coppens - Erik Mannens & Rik Van De Walle - Multimedia Lab - IBBT - UGent
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.
10:30am - 11:00am
The AES Standard and Software ToolsSpeakers Mike Casey - Indiana University
David Ackerman - Loeb Music Library Music Building Harvard University - Indiana UniversityMetadata 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.
10:30am - 12:00pm
Chair: David Pierce - Copyright Services
Speakers: Michael W. Carroll - American University, Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property
Sherwin Siy - Public Knowledge
Kim Bonner - Center for Intellectual PropertyKnowledge 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.
10:30am - 12:00pm
Chair: Melissa Dollman - Schlesinger Library/Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University
Mark Quigley - UCLA Film & Television ArchiveSpeakers: Louis Massiah - Scribe Video Center
John Pettit - Urban Archives at 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/researcherThis 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.).
11:00am - 12:00pm
Chair: Courtney Michael - WGBH Media Library & Archives
Chris Beer - WGBH InteractiveSpeakers: Courtney Michael - WGBH Educational Foundation
Jack Brighton - University of Illinois
Katrina Dixon - Northeast Historic Film
Kara Van Malssen - Broadway Video Digital MediaThere 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. Many in the moving image archival community have begun to utilize the standard. After 2 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 to date to bring it to PBCore 2.0. It will demo and tour the new redesigned PBCore.org website highlighting changes, navigation, and the community input features. And finally there will be several use cases showing practical use of PBCore in real archive projects. The end will be a roundtable discussion to get more feedback from the AMIA/IASA community and take questions
11:00am - 12:00pm
12:00pm - 1:00pm
Speakers: Marsha Orgeron and Devin Orgeron (North Carolina State University) - co-editors of The Moving Image
Jan-Christopher Horak, (UCLA) - The Moving Image founding editor
Dan Streible (NYU) - The Moving Image editorial board
Snowden Becker (University of Texas-Austin/Center for Home Movies) - The Moving Image editorial boardThis meeting is open to anyone who is interested in publishing in or learning more about AMIA's journal, The Moving Image. We will briefly introduce the journal; discuss its scope, features, and sections; speak about our experiences as authors and editors for TMI; and provide tips on preparing manuscripts for submission. This session will be of special interest to anyone who has not yet published in the journal, or who has questions about the benefits and requirements of academic publication. Our aim is to help demystify the process of publishing in the journal and to encourage high-quality submissions by explaining what we're looking for in essays, what common mistakes to avoid, and to how to best prepare a manuscript prior to submission. Attendees will be able to ask questions about their own projects and prospective submissions.
2:00pm - 3:30pm
Paper: Large Scale DAT-to-file Ingest and Annotation of Radio Programmes: The Path Chosen at Flemish Public Broadcaster VRT
Speaker: Brecht Declercq - 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.
Paper: Migration of Digital Media Storage - Practical Experiences
Speaker: Jouni Frilander - Finnish Broadcasting Company
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.
Paper: HathiTrust and the Challenge of Digital Audio
Speaker: Shane Beers & Bria Parker - University of Michigan
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. Our presentation will outline not only the challenges faced, but the solutions developed.2:00pm - 3:30pm
Chair: Geoff Alexander - Academic Film Archive of North America
Speakers: Brian Meacham - Academy Film Archive
Carson Davidson - Carson Davidson Films86 year-old independent filmmaker Carson Davidson. Davidson's remarkably eclectic body of work spanning areas such as transportation (the Oscar-nominated 'Third Avenue El"), Dadaism, and industrial and medical subjects. Davidson will discuss his work and the realities of independent filmmaking, and shows several of his films. The Academy Film Archive's Brian Meacham will screen a Davidson film recently preserved by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Questions to follow, time permitting, moderated by Geoff Alexander.
2:00pm - 3:30pm
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.While most archivists and scholars would acknowledge that life cycle moments, 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.
2:00pm - 3:30pm
Speakers Chris Lacinak - AudioVisual Preservation Solutions
Dave Rice - AudioVisual Preservation Solutions
George Blood - George Blood AudioMetadata is an integral component of digital preservation and an essential part of the digital object. Files without appropriate metadata are not understandable, interpretable, or manageable. Effectively, there is no preservation or meaningful access without metadata.
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.
4:30pm - 5:30pm
Chair: Ulrich Ruedel - Haghefilm Foundation
Daniela Currò - Haghefilm FoundationSpeakers: Anthony L'Abbate - George Eastman House
Sean Kelly - The University of Amsterdam
Jere Guldin - UCLA
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's its sporadic re-emergence in both film history and preservation will be discussed.4:30pm - 5:30pm
Chair: Rebecca Bachman - NYU, Department of Cinema Studies
Speakers: Sara Zia Ebrahimi - Termite TV Coordinating Producer/Flickering Light Films
Michael Kuetemeyer - Termite TV Co-director /Temple University
Laska Jimsen - Termite TV Board/Temple University, University of the ArtsThis session explores Philadelphia-based Termite TV's (www.termite.org) 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 an interactive walking tour of Philadelphia via their "Walk Philly" website (http://termite.org/walkphilly/category/termite-tv/) using their ipods or iphones.
4:30pm - 5:30pm
Chair: Brian Meacham - Academy Film Archive
Speakers: Steve Russell - New Zealand Film Archive
Russ Suniewick - Colorlab
Schawn Belston - Twentieth Century Fox
Leslie Lewis - Audiovisual Archive ConsultantIn the 1920s, New Zealand was the end of the line for American films shipped overseas for distribution. Through collectors, many of these nitrate prints have survived the intervening years at the New Zealand Film Archive. Hear from participants in a collaboration among the NFPF, the NZFA, and film archives and studios in the United States that has helped return dozens of American features, short films, cartoons, and newsreels to the U.S. to be preserved. The panel will present a discussion of the project from the perspectives of the the project coordinator at the New Zealand Film Archive, the archivists who inspected the films in New Zealand, those overseeing the project at American archives, the lab performing the preservation work, and a studio involved in the project.
7:30pm - 10:00pm
AMIA 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.
10:00pm - 11:30pm
Chair: Stephen Parr - San Francisco Media Archive/Oddball Film+Video
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 long stint at the Moore College of Art and Design this "floating repertory" film series has become Philadelphia's best known offbeat film programs. Tonight Jay 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.
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