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AVPreserve at AIC 2014

AVPreserve Senior Consultant Kara Van Malssen will be presenting at the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (AIC) 42nd Annual Meeting in San Francisco, CA this week. The theme of this year’s meeting is Conscientious Conservation – Sustainable Choices in Collection Care. Kara will be on a panel at the Electronic Media Group Luncheon on Friday with Jim Coddington (Chief Conservator, Museum of Modern Art), Ben Fino-Radin (Digital Repository Manager, Museum of Modern Art), and Dan Gillean (AtoM Product Manager, Artefactual Systems) to discuss MoMA’s effort to design and build the first digital repository for museum collections (DRMC). This has been a long-gestating and much-needed tool to help ensure the long-term viability and sustainability of MoMA’s time-based and file-based artworks, and its development has involved a lot of critical, innovative thinking and collaboration across many of the departments at the Museum. Kara and AVPreserve have provided consultative support in various aspects of development for much of the length of the project. We’ve been excited and honored to be a part of it and to participate in the AIC panel. We’ve always enjoyed AIC for the great community and the fascinating, educational projects and topics that are discussed. Say hi to Kara if you’re attending.

Seeking Diversity and a Unified Field

When I was an undergrad there was a certain lament felt by various factions of the English department over the belief that teaching was becoming more difficult because there was less and less (perceived) cultural common ground among students and between faculty and students. In the past, they felt, it could be assumed that most students were coming in with at a least a basic knowledge of things such as the christian Bible, American history, maybe some classical Greek and Roman literature, and other canonical or popular works. With this presumed commonality, texts that may allude to such works could be easily dived into and discussed. Some felt, however, that it was becoming the case more and more that this was not true anymore. Whether due to the vast expansion of the number of works available and what was considered popular or worthy of study, or a shift to a more diverse cultural background in the student body, or the constant fluctuation of authors falling in and out of favor in the academy, or changing high school curricula, certain professors were finding that they first had to start classes by laying a groundwork of understanding that was not necessary before. They had to actually teach the Bible before they could teach the Bible as it pertained to or was the source of other works or historic moments.

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Episode 9 of More Podcast Less Process Now Available

Episode #9 of “More Podcast, Less Process”, the archives podcast co-produced by METRO and AVPreserve, is now available for streaming and download. This week’s episode is “All Archives Are Local: Talking with the National Archives & Records Administration” with guests Bonnie Marie Sauer (Archivist, National Archives at New York City) and Kevin De Vorsey (Supervisory Electronic Records Format Specialist, National Archives and Records Administration) discussing the work that NARA does to manage billions of records, develop collecting policies for an ever changing set of formats, and provide access and research assistance to the public. The scope and scale of what NARA is responsible for is not widely understood, and it was a fascinating, revealing conversation even though Josh and Jefferson just seemed to scrape the surface of this organization that is a critical to our understanding of local and national history, as well as being one of the main conduits for how we the people can interact with our government.

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We Do Not Preserve, We Sustain

So it’s Preservation Week — the true Old Home Week (ba-dum-dum!) — and even though the P word is a part of our company name, I am predictably nitpicky (predictably, and perhaps wearisomely, at least to my office mates, the poor kids) of its use for this celebratory week. Now, of course, preservation is probably the best sounding word and the one with the most traction (at least in the US), but overall there are certain burdens that come with the word’s connotations that make advocacy and communication about our profession difficult.

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BWF MetaEdit Version 1.3.1 Released

Version 1.3.1 of the free metadata extraction and editing tool BWF MetaEdit is now available on SourceForge. BWF MetaEdit was developed by AVPreserve in collaboration with the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative Audio-Visual Working Group (FADGI) as a tool to support reviewing, editing, adding, and exporting embedded metadata in Broadcast WAVE Files. The tool is a simple desktop application that can easily be integrated into workflows that help monitor the creation and management of WAVE audio files, abilities that were previously only available in expensive digital audio production software. BWF MetaEdit is a free tool, available via SourceForge or along with many other free applications on our Tools page. The updates include:

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AVPreserve at MAC and MARAC

AVPreserve will be covering a large portion of the continent this weekend, attending both the Midwest Archives Conference Annual Meeting in Kansas City, MO and the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference Spring Meeting in Rochester, NY. Our newest team member, Senior Consultant Bertram Lyons, will be at MAC and is lucky to travel to one of our favorite American cities. AVPreserve President Chris Lacinak and Senior Consultant Josh Ranger will both be presenting on panels at MARAC. It will be our 5th MARAC conference and we’re excited to finally be participating on panels.

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AVPreserve Seeking Institution for SAA 2014 Service Project

In conjunction with the events around Society of American Archivists 2014 annual meeting in Washington, DC, AVPreserve is planning an archival day of service centered on an audiovisual collection. We are currently seeking an institution with an audio, video, film, or mixed audiovisual collection in need of help, and who will be willing and able to allow 10-20 archival professionals into their facilities to work with the collections. Many a/v collections are severely under-processed, a state that inhibits preservation planning, budgeting, and ability to provide access.

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Chris Lacinak Instructing NEDCC Preservation Workshop

AVPreserve President Chris Lacinak will be in Boston this week to conduct an audiovisual preservation workshop on Friday, April 18th. Sponsored by the Northeast Document Conservation Center, Audiovisual Digitization: Preparing for a Successful Preservation Project will walk participants through the various decision points of developing the specifications for a statement of work (SOW) for a video digitization project. The combination of lecture and hands-on activities will help attendees understand the importance of those specifications, the impact and reasoning behind selecting different specifications, and how a well thought out SOW can help make a preservation project run more smoothly and help an organization achieve their preservation goals. A copy of Chris’ white paper Guide to Developing a Request for Proposal for the Digitization of Video (and More) can be downloaded for free from the avpreserve.com Papers and Presentations page.

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New Paper on Embedded Metadata

Newly available on our Papers and Presentations page is AVPreserve President Chris Lacinak‘s paper Embedded Metadata in WAVE Files: A Look Inside Issues and Tools. Embedded metadata is crucial to managing digital assets, supporting activities as varied as making it easy to find and listen to music in iTunes, authenticating the source and content of a photograph, and performing quality control on content that has been digitized from analog sources. The key duties of an archive — promoting findability, usability, and persistence of collections — would be nearly impossible without embedded metadata.

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New Cloud Storage Vendor Profiles

Following up on our recent white paper Nine Things To Consider When Assessing Cloud Storage, AVPreserve is pleased to announce the release of our first three Cloud Storage Vendor Profiles researched and complied by Consultant Seth Anderson. Part of our Feet on The Ground: A Practical Approach to The Cloud initiative, these profiles break down the offerings of third party cloud storage providers from a preservation point of view. Assessment points include Data Management, Reporting/Metadata, Redundancy, Accessibility, Security, End of Service, and adherence to the NDSA’s Levels of Preservation. With many of the preservation decisions to make when dealing with audiovisual and digital media, there are not a lot of cut-and-dried, one-size-fits-all answers. There are options, the selection of which depend greatly on what the goals and capabilities of your organization are, as well as what level of vigilance or of risk you are willing to take on. Our hope is to provide organizations with information that will help them in that decision making process.

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