AMIA 2024

Dear Peer Review Panel and Committee, my name is Johana Canales and I am a second year MLIS student attending the University of Alabama. I will be starting an audiovisual archiving and preservation internship at the University of Houston in August and I would like to create a poster presentation about the work I will be doing there. Unfortunately, I do not know the specifics of my project yet since I have not started it, so I cannot provide you with any further information about it at this time. I will be under the supervision of Emily Vinson. I should be able to provide you with a proper proposal by late September or early October.

This poster will present the first two years of MARMIA’s three-year CLIR-funded project, "Broadcasting Baltimore: Digitizing Hidden Histories in the WJZ-TV Collection." The goal is to digitize and describe 1000 hours of video from the WJZ-TV Collection that documents the voices of underrepresented communities in Baltimore from 1977-2000. We’ve increased description and access by implementing a sync integration through our platforms: Internet Archive, ArchivesSpace, and Aviary. The sync keeps metadata and digital objects consistent and improves discoverability through transcripts and indexes. We are additionally collaborating with the statewide digital preservation program, Digital Maryland, to increase discoverability. This project has improved description with a focus on highlighting content about those who have been historically excluded, as well as improved workflows, and tools. Recent activations of our reformatted analog records through documentaries and exhibitions reflect how this project is furthering our mission to keep our analog collections relevant to users today.

Few know that in the late 1970s Jean-Luc Godard had intended to make a film about the history of cinema. Godard and long-time friend Serge Losique, founder of the Montreal World Film Festival, together envisaged a collaborative film that would be based around a series of lectures Godard gave to students at Concordia University, where Losique taught. For a variety of reasons the film was never made. But the lectures have survived and are currently held by the university archive. Preserving and making them accessible has been a long and often challenging ordeal. AI and Natural Language Processing tools have helped immensely in this endeavor. In particular, the use of AI to transcribe and sub-title source material with dialogue frequently inaudible to the average human ear has provided the prospect of recovering and purveying more of the footage than was previously imagined.

This poster is meant to show a workflow for working with materials in a language and about a culture that one is not a part of and isn't familiar with. In her experience at the Zohrab Information Center, Linda was able to rely on her supervisor and coworkers for translation assistance, and conducted research to better understand materials and their significance. Linda shares some of her key takeaways and discusses how much this experience has shaped her as an archivist.

This poster will involve Stanley Kubrick's first three films and how they were restored in a two state process. The titles are Day of the Fight, The Flying Padre and the Seafarers. There will be a display that will illustrate the beginnings of Kubrick's first three films as archival examples of how various visual demonstrations of his work compare to his later work. There will also be frame shot comparison allowing the viewer to detect frame shot comparisons to his later work.

The Smithsonian’s Audiovisual Media Preservation Initiative (AVMPI) is a pan-institutional, centralized resource that supports the needs of individual Smithsonian units to preserve and provide access to audiovisual collections. AVMPI has focused on enhancing current in-house transfer capacity for 8mm “small gauge” video formats: Video8, Hi8, and Digital8. However, we observed a noticeable lack of published standards for these amateur formats and preferred to not only rely on “anecdata”, or anecdotal evidence shared among trusted professional peers. Therefore, AVMPI set forth conducting analysis on 8mm video assets to investigate the best way to digitally transfer these formats. Through this poster, we will share our results and how we used them to transfer unique oral histories of prominent figures at Tuskegee University discussing the history of African American Land Grant Colleges (from the National Museum of American History Archive Center collections).