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).

This poster shares lessons learned from a remastering of a news segment from a WTMJ TV newsreel on Alcoholism in Milwaukee using the kinescope copy of the original broadcast as a reference. This project was part of a graduate fieldwork project performed in the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee's Archives Department on the WTMJ TV News Collection. The poster will cover the approach to matching the cuts in Adobe Premiere, the difference between optical and digital titles, the process for recreating the titles, and the use of noise reduction tools In Adobe Audition. Reflections will also be provided on the unique challenges of this project, such as the loss of experience-based knowledge on older broadcast television technologies.

Come learn how NPR’s Research, Archives & Data Strategy (RAD) team tackles iterative change while maintaining an active production pipeline. NPR’s production archives rely on automated ingest and export of data from various sources, including internal story and content APIs, XML from transcript vendors, and internal publishing APIs. This poster will walk through the current digital transformation taking place both within and outside of the archives to optimize and strengthen these connections, move away from legacy system architectures, and reduce manual processing steps for information specialists. Learn about our previous technical solutions, current infrastructure decisions and changes, and RAD’s necessary future work. We would love to chat about NPR’s archives and transcripts data processing workflows, how technical changes are made within organizations, and how other archives are managing their descriptive records and audiovisual data!

OpenArchive is a nonprofit organization that co-develops/creates responsive, secure, verifiable, and ethical archiving tools - like our free, open-source secure archiving app Save - and resources with human rights defenders and NGOs to advance justice and accountability. In this poster presentation, Nicole Martin, Teague Schneiter, and Natalie Cadranel discuss OpenArchive’s new research and novel development using the Decentralized Web (DWeb) as a backend offers a more robust, distributed, verifiable, secure way to archive media. DWeb as a backend enables: community control of collections, preservation of data as evidence, circumvention of content takedowns or censorship, and the verification and protection of sensitive information. In environments that prioritize data integrity, authenticity and security, decentralized alternatives can provide archives a way to build community-based infrastructure, transition away from big tech, and securely store human rights data. This presentation will also cover some of the emergent threats and challenges when working with decentralized storage technology.

Crown Point, Indiana April 1934. The last moving images of gangster John Dillinger, taken at the Crown Point County Jail 33 days before he was shot and killed.

It is estimated that approximately 80% of archival footage from the American Civil Rights Movement is held by local US television news stations (Frick, 2023). Unfortunately, this footage is unaccounted for and/or has not been properly preserved. This poster highlights the contributions and impact of Dr. Grace McFadden’s oral history project, The Quest for Civil Rights: Oral Recollections of Black South Carolinians, which aired on South Carolina’s WIS-TV. In this project, Dr. McFadden interviewed African-American activists and professionals who were influential in the fight for American civil rights, especially in South Carolina. This footage centers African-American voices in South Carolinian history and makes space for African-American women to tell their stories, which were often overlooked when documenting the Civil Rights Movement. The Quest for Civil Rights footage has been preserved by the University of South Carolina’s Moving Image Research Collection (MIRC) and Dr. McFadden’s interviews can be viewed on their website.

Discover the journey of WQED Multimedia, the nation’s first community-supported public media station, as they launch their first archival program. This poster delves into WQED’s rich history and efforts to preserve its Black history collections. Learn the foundational steps for building a new archive and how the collaborative spirit within the archival community supports that work. Share your thoughts on establishing a new program through an interactive survey and help shape the future of media archives.

AI companies are eager to amass collections of content to train both large language and niche models. In some cases, companies turn to archives and pay handsomely for what, for them, is valuable and unique raw material. Only the largest and most well-resourced archives have been able to take advantage of this opportunity. We are exploring models that better highlight the value of archival content, give institutions more opportunity for partnerships, and try to give more balance in negotiations. We outline how rights issues can be resolved with more technical knowledge and better understanding of intended use of archival material. Importantly, we propose how, working collectively, archives can foster a new revenue stream for digitization, preservation, and improved access to their collections.