AMIA 2024

This session will delve into the Autistic Voices Oral History Project (tAVOHP), an initiative challenging neuro-normative assumptions within archives and oral history, shifting the field toward a neuro-affirming framework. Launched in 2023, tAVOHP addresses the underrepresentation of Autistic lived experiences in the historic record by documenting and preserving the stories of Autistic advocates. Participants will receive an introduction to the neurodiversity paradigm, neuro-affirming frameworks, Autistic culture, and discuss the “double-empathy problem.” Emphasizing cross-neurotype communication as a core competency, this session aims to set a precedent for future memory work. Project staff will share Autistically-informed methodologies for conducting oral history, providing practical strategies for enhancing communication, creating inclusive spaces, building trust and understanding, and empowering Autistic narratives. Attendees will learn how to create supportive environments for Autistic patrons, donors, colleagues, and others, fostering a more inclusive and empathetic approach to archival practices. The session will also introduce the The Autistic Lived Experience: Community Curation and Memory Workers Fellowship funded by IMLS in partnership with AMIA and the Association for Autism and Neurodiversity (AANE). AMIA members are encouraged to apply for the fellowship, with the call for applications open through January 2025.

Nitrate film vaults are constructed very infrequently and taking on this challenge in 2024 is not for the faint of heart. The handling and storage of nitrate film requires exceptional levels of expertise, care, training, and safety precautions. Building a new nitrate film vault is, therefore, a complex endeavor. PRO-TEK Vaults is one of the few certified providers of nitrate film restoration and preservation services in the U.S. and PRO-TEK’s team regularly provides guidance and services to presidential libraries, universities, museums, news organizations, corporations, and motion picture studios. Over the last few years, industry colleagues discussed their desire for additional nitrate film storage in the greater Los Angeles area. In this session, Tim Knapp and Doug Sylvester from PRO-TEK will discuss the process they started in 2022 to scope, design, build, and operate a new nitrate film vault which will open in early 2025.

Pathways Fellows from 2020, 2022, and 2023 share what they're working on now.

This session examines the 16mm film collections of KUHT (Houston, TX, first aired May 25, 1953) and WKAR (East Lansing, MI, first aired January 15, 1954), two of the earliest public educational TV stations in the U.S. We will explore the historical context behind their establishment following the FCC’s freeze on new broadcast licenses, highlighting their mission to provide educational and cultural programming. The session reviews their diverse content, from academic subjects to cultural programming, showcasing innovative educational broadcasting approaches. We will also discuss the technical choices between filmed productions and kinescope recordings and their implications for preservation. Finally, we will share strategies for digitizing these collections, including securing funding and overcoming obstacles to ensure these historical materials are accessible to modern audiences.

In the moving image preservation community there's a lot of concern about and discussion of image quality, resolution, and formats. What about the sound? As film scanners have improved over time, they have added features and functionality. A decade ago sound film was scanned in two passes - once on a telecine to capture the picture, then again on a sound reproducer - which then required assembling the two elements together in an editing program. Now most film scanners will scan both sound and picture in one pass. Is this a good thing? Have we compromised performance for this convenience and labor/cost savings? Recently George Blood Audio/Video/Film/Data was in the market for a new film scanner. At last year's AMIA we presented on the factors impacting image capture, and showed the results from different models. This year we present our findings on the sound reproduction, both mag and optical, of three high end film scanners.

The Al Larvick Conservation Fund granting organization celebrates its 10th anniversary in 2024. The Fund provides support for digitization and conservation of American home movies and amateur media, with a unique approach that extends to collection individuals and families. The Fund administers two annual grants: a National Grant for recipients across the country and a Regional Grant for Upper Midwestern states. Its mission goes beyond providing digitization, ensuring that the materials are actively utilized and celebrated through detailed Airtable cataloging, screening programs, and oral histories. These activities ensure that the personal media are made accessible and well-curated for future generations. The panel session will feature contributions from board members, vendors, and grant recipients, showcasing the organization's transformative impact and its role in revitalizing personal and community histories, while also addressing its limitations.

With the project “Expanding Film Culture’s Field of Vision,” the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR) is processing and sharing collections from individuals and institutions that helped push American film culture beyond the mainstream, across different regions and time periods. The project, funded by a National Historical Publications and Records Commission grant, includes four collections: Amos Vogel (Cinema 16 founder, New York Film Festival co-founder, Annenberg Center director of film), Chuck Kleinhans (Jump Cut co-founder/editor, Northwestern University professor, experimental filmmaker), Elfrieda Abbe (film critic, Angles: Women Working in Film and Video editor), and the Wisconsin Film Festival. Speakers from WCFTR and Chicago Film Archives will discuss collaborations between the two Midwestern archives and other film organizations that produced screenings, film scans, and digital exhibits for this project, increasing access to the rare avant-garde and independent films represented in these collections.

LTO data tape is used by archives as a stable solution for backing up digital files. The current generation, LTO-9, has also introduced some challenges when there are differences in the physical environment of the writing location vs. that of the reading location. One of the noted features of the format since LTO-5, the LTFS open file system used for writing data to LTO tape, will no longer be supported by IBM past version 2.4.5 on PCs running Windows 10 or 11. Additionally, there is a trend by LTO tape library and software manufacturers to ignore LTFS and incorporate object storage technologies into LTO tape libraries, resulting in data on tape being locked into proprietary systems. This session will explain the implications of these changes in the LTO format as related to digital preservation, to help guide attendees’ future use of LTO data storage in their digital preservation planning.

A decade into the magnetic media crisis, video’s obsolescence means that playback equipment is getting harder to maintain, making digital reformatting efforts more difficult. Expert knowledge of how to repair and maintain VCRs and VTRs is becoming rarer, and the supply of original parts is decreasing. Without access to industrial manufacturing processes, new parts can’t be made. Or can they? This presentation will explore 3D printing’s current and potential applications for repairing VCRs and VTRs and give an overview of the technologies and software involved in workflows for 3D Printing for Repair (3DPfR). The presenter will also discuss their own experiences with a 3DPfR project for a Sony SLV-740HF consumer VHS player, including their successes, failures and areas for future research. This presentation will cover how 3D printing can be used to repair legacy video equipment and the work that still needs to be done to reach this goal.

AMIA members are among the leading professional and scholarly voices worldwide on issues surrounding the preservation, archiving, and restoration of film, video, and digital moving images. They write not only for AMIA’s journal, The Moving Image, but also author books and articles for a wide variety of publications.  This session offers a sneak peek at a few upcoming publications, with time for Q&A with the authors / editors. Have something you’re working on and want to figure out how to get it in the world?  Curious about publishing? Want to make folks aware of something you’ve just published?  Join us for a mostly informal chat. Let’s get our work out there!

In this session, TAMI seeks to provide archivists with insight into how to implement a lab build-out at a fraction of the cost. In 2023, the organization was able to complete a digitization lab build-out for $4,700 by using tactics such as crowdsourcing donations through a successful "Equipment Round-Up" campaign on social media, purchasing consumer-grade equipment, and gleaning second-hand sales. In the spirit of knowledge-sharing, our presentation offers a down-to-earth approach that will reveal "imperfections" in our workflow and destigmatize affordable solutions to solve costly problems. We'll also cover the merits of an apprenticeship model, which has become integral to the lab's daily operations. By de-centering the emphasis on advanced degrees to work in the moving image archiving field, we have increased our capacity while simultaneously breaking down barriers to entering this elusive field by encouraging those with no formal archival training or degrees to join Team TAMI.

How do collaborations between artists, community members and archives push forward archival methodologies and practices? This session will present strategies of curatorial and artistic modes of collaboration within the archive, using Visual Studies Workshop (VSW) as a case study. Artist/filmmaker and curator Tara Merenda Nelson and curator, scholar, and archivist, Almudena Escobar López will co-present on the central role of the archives within VSW’s public programming initiatives. Merenda Nelson will present on VSW’s Community Curator Program and the seasonal Salon series that directly connect members of the community with VSW archives, as well as the media transfer laboratory. Escobar López will discuss VSW’s artistic residencies and their use of archives as an example of archival intervention and inquiry.

Earlier in the week practitioners and managers of digital audiovisual collections joined with developers and engineers for an intense day of collaboration to develop and refine simple tools for digital audiovisual preservation and access. Today we’ll review their work and hear the results of some of these collaborations.

Since 2021 the Federal Agency Digital Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) Audio-Visual Working Group has maintained an active Accessibility Subgroup focused on documenting accessibility guidelines and processes for cultural heritage institutions and supporting accessibility features in AV archives tools. At this session FADGI and project partners will present lightning talks on the subgroup’s initiatives and related work. Improvements and feature enhancements to embARC, vrecord, BWF MetaEdit, and ffmpeg will be discussed, as will four recent FADGI publications: Definitions for Key Accessibility Features for Digital Audiovisual Collections Content, Software Accessibility for Open Source Digital Preservation Applications, Guidelines: Embedded Metadata in WebVTT Files, and The Current State of Accessibility Features for Audiovisual Collections Content in Five FADGI Institutions. The subgroup’s products assist archives and libraries to serve users who are blind, have low vision, are deaf or hard of hearing, prefer to read transcripts and subtitles, or prefer sign language.

Throughout the 1970s, video artists were studying, deconstructing, and recomposing surplus scientific and consumer video equipment in pursuit of new technological languages. What emerged from this period of invention were hand built video tools such as the PaikAbe synthesizer and the Jones analog/digital synthesizers - machines that had been custom crafted (or ‘hacked’) by artists who were pushing the boundaries of existing technologies to create instruments that could serve a purpose beyond that which was deemed commercially desirable. Fifty years later, the work made by these innovators requires equally inventive workflows and technologies in order to be preserved. This session will explore archivist Nilson Carroll’s (Visual Studies Workshop) preservation of works made by video artist Peer Bode (Experimental Television Center, Institute for Electronic Arts) in the 1970s. Carroll has been working closely with Bode to preserve the artist’s early experiments recorded on ½” videotape, many of which feature “glitches” that push the video signal to its limits or display the signal in new ways. Examples of Bode’s tapes will be shown and the problem solving that went into the preservation of those tapes will be discussed.

Film was the best and only choice shooting, finishing, exhibition, and archiving of theatrical motion pictures for over a century, and has been eclipsed in the past 25 years by digital technologies. However, in spite of the near-obliteration of film infrastructure at every step of the process, that long history has led many to believe that film remains that best choice for long-term archiving, This paper will detail the “before” (the starting points of restorations and contemporary movies) and the “after” (what deliverables will be needed in 100 years). Focus will also be given to three often-overlooked factors: the long-term cost of film and its migration problems; the inability of film to archive sound; and the reliability of digital archiving, including how common mistakes can be avoided. The goal remains to make, finish, and archive motion pictures in a truly future-proof, and not a past-proof, manner.

Nitrate film is often one of the oldest materials held in audiovisual collections. It is a challenging format; stable when stored in good conditions but potentially dangerous when poorly managed. With the development of scanning technology that captures the unique tints and tones of nitrate many archives are pursuing active programs of digitisation and access. This raises some interesting challenges with the movement and handling of nitrate materials and whether our current procedures accurately reflect the actual risks of the format. Do we really understand when nitrate is dangerous? Should we reconsider storage conditions when building new facilities? Do we have the right information available to determine and manage the risks AND to ensure that beautiful nitrate film content is available to our audiences.

This panel aims to guide archivists on the critical process of negotiating rights before accepting audiovisual donations. Our goal is to empower attendees with the necessary knowledge and tools to establish clear rights agreements and ensure ethical usage of donated materials, thus enhancing their collections' value and accessibility. The panel will emphasize best practices for acquiring news and documentary collections, highlighting the importance of addressing rights at the point of acquisition.

This panel will focus on community engagement and participation in the DVRescue Project. Since 2019, MIPoPS and RiceCapades has worked on the NEH funded DVRescue project, developing the procedures, tools and documentation to assist audiovisual archivists with preserving their DV videotapes. Through this work, we have developed, tested and modified a variety of tools and documentation that encompass a set of best practices we recommend to the greater archival community for all aspects of DV videotape preservation, including capturing, troubleshooting, analyzing, and quality control. The DVRescue team will provide some updates on the project and demonstrate the latest builds. Members of the archival community participating in the DVRescue project will describe their experience and practical application of the tools.

Cinema’s First Nasty Women is a multi-part research, curation, and outreach project focused on expanding critical engagement with long-overlooked feminist films and filmmakers of the silent period. This session will present the results of the project’s most recent study: a demographics and attitudes survey of contemporary silent cinema audiences. The anonymous online survey was issued in spring of 2024, and received more than 3,000 responses. Survey questions covered basic demographic data, film viewing habits, exposure to silent cinema, familiarity with silent cinema organizations, and interest in feminist film scholarship. Presentation attendees can expect to come away with a more accurate understanding of the silent film community’s social profile in terms of gender, race, sexuality, age, and class. Analysis and discussion will explore practical takeaways for marketing, outreach, and advocacy decisions--but also raise questions about the purpose and impact of public programming.