It's Cool To See It In Print...

Another Resource

Thanks to the ARSC listserv, I have discovered another resource: http://digitalforward.net/. While there, check out their white paper.

Let's Talk Stock

Did you know that there are no longer any producers of magnetic audio tape (reel to reel)? Did you know that there is now only one producer of gold-standard CDs and DVDs (in the UK)? Did you know that VHS tape stock is probably the next to disappear?

Companies like Imation, 3M, and Sony have been shifting to producing electronic media and computer data tape, but no longer audio visual tape media. What does this mean for archivists?

1) Competing with collectors.
Do you know collectors? Have you actually talked to one? During grad school, collectors were presented as the obsessive patrons that lurk around special collections and try to steal your valuable (monetary or intrinsic) materials (as in The Island of Lost Maps). After meeting a lot of collectors at the ARSC conference last year, I realized that although they can be obsessive (but aren't we all?), they are usually ahead of archivists, predicting technological trends, especially when it comes to obsolescence. They collect prior to the format disappearing, rather than once the formats are no longer used prominently. If you want stock, start compiling it now because in another few years, it's not going to be accessible!

2) Re-thinking migration programs.
If your archive was fortunate enough to start an analog to analog carrier migration program, you'll no longer be able to buy new stock. Sure, you can buy old stock, stock that might be degraded as much as the tape you're trying to transfer. You can also buy re-purposed blank stock--tapes that have been used and are in good enough condition to be re-used. You could also redesign your migration program to go digital. Which brings us to...

3) Going digital!
Do you have a Content Management System (CMS)? Are you developing it? You're really going to need one unless you want a lot of files without metadata floating around on your server in a few years.

4) Developing digital standards.
Do the research. ARSC and AMIA have great technical guidelines and recommendations, but you need to find what will work practically for your archive.

5) Re-thinking grants.
Preservation grant standards have changed (or should be changing soon)! Analog to analog is dead. It's analog to digital or even digital to digital.

A/V Website

After 1.5 years of work, developing my skills, and using two student assistants, the CUA Archives A/V Website went live today! The previous website is available as a screenshot in this post, for comparision.

Warning: Audio Visual Archivist!

I found this today. All I can say is who created this, and how can I thank you?

Seriously Sick of Snow

I'm seriously sick of snow! The best part of being an archivist is that you can't take your work home with you. But the worst part of being an archivist is that you have OCD tendencies that go crazy when you're trapped indoors with no materials to organize or a/v systems to create. I just want to go to work!!!

Continuing Education-Lyrasis (Update)

I received an email today, stating that due to low enrollment, my online class was cancelled. Why are more archivists not interested in taking these opportunities?

A Little Bit of Everything...

Yesterday I spent the day finalizing all of the information for the film preservation vendor and scrapbook digitization vendor, and making a few last edits to the a/v website. Other than audio preservation research, it seems like I'm just waiting for my student assistant to return so I can start her on new projects (which are accumulating). I've been working on requests, but they're either in the pre- or post-digitization stage, so I've been make a supply wishlist for panoramic photos and audio reels.

So... today I'm catching up on odds and ends, and reading Sound Directions. It feels like a Friday. Maybe I'm subconsciously hoping for a snow day tomorrow.

Continuing Education-Lyrasis

Librarians and Archivists should continue learning after graduation through classes, workshops, and conferences. Lyrasis is an organization that specializes in educational classes in new trends or technologies, management, or what I like to call "things you probably should learn a little more about but didn't learn in school." Some classes are at actual buildings, but many are what they call "Live (Online)," live classes taught via a special Internet chatroom, where you can interact with the professor and other attendees. I have taken one live online class and have enjoyed the format very much. Chatroom capabilities have come a long way! (Lyrasis also offers Live (On Demand) classes, but I have not attended one, yet.)

Lyrasis is offering a class called "The Preservation of Recorded Sound Media, Digital and Analog" on February 5 from 10am-12pm. It will discuss formats, preservation concerns, and digitization options. I am very interested in the digitization options, and look forward to attending!

Back to Work!

It's Monday and I'm back at work after a two-week vacation! I was compiling projects for the upcoming semester. What's on deck?

*Digitizing two scrapbooks from a alumni's father (the father was also an alumni), and creating the corresponding photo digital collections;
*School of Music audio recording project, consisting of organizing, re-housing, processing, researching digitization and digital preservation standards, digitizing, and cataloging;
*Department of Athletics film preservation and digitization project, consisting of working with a vendor to preserve and digitize the films, and then marketing the films to the university community properly to acquire funds to digitize more films;
*Finish EAD finding aids for two large university photo collections;
*Finish the A/V website coding (one page left!);
*Re-house a large portion of the audio and moving image media in the archives (when moving materials, I discovered the poor housing was leading to deterioration of some audio and films);
*Not go crazy attempting to finish all of this by May-ish.
Goals vs. what will actually be completed... Let's see how much I can do!

Website in the Works

On Friday I almost completed the audio visual section of the Archive's website. The only thing I have yet to complete is the collection listing for the manuscript collections or series. I have completed the first half of the alphabet. When I return in January, I will finish and be able to submit all of the changes to the website administrators. I expect there will be some changes. My goal is to have the eight web pages up by February.

My next step is to get some kind of blog capability so I can do a "Featured Collection" page, and either list the most recently processed collection, or list collections that have had recent work performed (such as the Department of Athletic films). Currently, we do have a news section on the main Archives website, though the entries are only text, with no option for imbedded images or streaming video (http://www.lib.cua.edu/newsevents/category/acua/). Not that these features are revolutionary in the Archives website world, but these features, because it would be able to keep us competing with the most web-savvy academic archives: http://www.lib.unc.edu/blogs/news/index.php/category/exhibits/
(like this but more interactive).

Fantastic Films

After wrapping up discussions on the reception last night, I erased quite a few things from my to-do dry erase board, and added my new projects. In the next week and two days I will be starting to focus solely on the CUA School of Music audio recordings, and the CUA Department of Athletics films. I made great progress today, which has left me in a super happy mood!

I talked with my supervisor about starting the film preservation/digitization project. Starting is a lose term because I located two collections of severely degraded films a little over a year ago. I had students perform surveys (library students who jumped to have the experience to learn about and survey film, not that were grudingly stuck with vinegar syndrome films) to complete an inventory but to also survey preservation concerns. I met with Russ Suniewick, President (and representative) of ColorLab, a film laboratory and telecine service, who appraised the films, took the surveys, and provided an estimate soon after.

And then we sat on those estimates because we didn't have the money to do either large project. I proposed doing a few films as a pilot project to my supervisors, and then we can use this pilot project to get money from donors who can help us to complete this project. However, I could not pursue this project because of the reception.

Today was a day for new goals.

Today I contacted our sales rep, agreed on a price and type of project we are looking to do, re-reviewed the inventory, selected the five films (based on level of deterioration and potential for popularity and donor appeal), and FedEx-ed them off to ColorLab!

Tomorrow, audio!

New Reading

Last week I broke down and ordered several books from my SAA "wishlist" (I think they should have that option like Amazon). Anyway... I received them last night!

Photographs: Archival Care and Management by Mary Lynn Rizenthaler and Diane Vogt-O'Connor

AMIA Compendium of Moving Image Cataloging Practice

Film Preservation: Competing Definitions of Valud, Use, and Practice by Karen F. Gracy (my former professor)

The Film Preservation Guide: The Basics for Archives, Libraries, and Museums by NFPF (yes, I have this as a PDF, but it's only $8 and that's worth hours not staring at a computer)

Preservation and Storage of Sound Recordings by A.G. Pickett and M.M. Lemcoe (an oldie but goodie)

There was a problem with my order so I have not yet received my final book, Creating Digital Audio Resources: A Guide to Good Practice

What is that?

One of the most common questions I hear from someone referring to my media is "What is that?"

I recieved a plea of help phone all from a fellow special librarian on campus about a grad student needing to watch a film for a project. They didn't have the equipment, nor did they know if the film was playable. After a few initial questions like the date of the film and if it smelled (acetate or polyester), and the appoximate size (16 or 8), I decided it was worth examining in person, and playing it. So Friday afternoon, I loaded my favorite 16mm sound film projector on a hand truck, got a take-up reel in another hand, and put some cotton gloves in my coat pocket and wheeled the projector across campus (very slowy). And I do mean all the way across campus. A few students gave me odd looks, and an older professor stopped me and said, "It's not every day you see a 35mm projector." to which I replied, "Thank goodness this is only a 16mm projector!" He laughed. I was almost to my destination and very worn out by that point.

The film was in fairly good condition for an early 1970s polyester film, except for the red-shift, which is only confusing for the student. I'm going over today to set the equipment up for the student, and I will get one of the Archive's students to help me bring the projector back to the Archives (it was too heavy to wheel across campus)!

Getting Dirty in the Archives

After getting my normal amount of requests filled this morning, and planning a meeting tomorrow, I went back to the Triangle (a nook behind the stacks where the audio visual center was placed) to look at some of the audio visual equipment for a project and then I realized something...

Tomorrow I will have interviewed at CUA two years ago. The equipment has been extremely disorganized since my interview. It has not been organized though it has been on my to-do list for almost two years. The OCD in me can't stand to be around it. Ugh.

After a brief freak-out brought on by the disorganization, I took a deep breath, took off my cardigan and scarf, and went to work.

I arranged some of the audio visual collections that were intermixed on the equipment shelves on the new shelving we received a month ago, and then spent several hours organizing the equipment by genre (photographic, audio, moving image), and then by format (slide, microfiche/film, steroview, phonograph, reel to reel, cassette, 8mm/16mm film, videotape recorder/player, Umatic, Beta, and Laserdisc). The VHS is hooked up to the TV because that's something we use frequently. I started to organize the supplies for the equipment, but then I realized I was dirty and sore, so that's another day's work. At least I can now have my student worker write a complete inventory without moving things around, and we will actually know what we have and where it is!

After the supplies are organized, the next step is to get the new A/V Mac up and running, and to start organizing the most-likely-to-be-used equipment on the heavy-duty A/V desk.

The best of both loves...

Here's a story I found on Slate about the vaudeville singer Eva Tanguay, who has faded into obscurity, but was really one of the premiere US "rock stars" in the early 1900s! I also loved the slide show of old photographs. The digitization was done very well. I could almost smell the deteriorating paper backing! Anyway, this story combines a lot of my "loves"... Old photographs, vaudeville and historic music theater, and old recordings!

Copyright Issue Update

This is an update from yesterday's copyright issue.

After talking with a lawyer in the General Cousel's Office, we decided that digitizing and providing a digital copy via ILL for research purposes only was a permissable use of the dissertation recording under the contract doctoral students sign for their dissertation (according to a university policy), and fair use laws. The lawyer also said that the policy we consulted for the use of doctoral dissertations was a bit ambiguous, had not been updated in a few years, and she would work with the Dean of Graduate Studies to update this policy to account for the advances in technology and the University's use of technology to distribute dissertations.

Our Archives will have to work on a new policy for this new procedure.

Copyright Issue

One of today's big issues was a question concerning a lecture recital dissertation from 1976 from the CUA School of Music. (The Archives holds the record copy of the School of Music's recordings from the 1930s to the present.)

The ILL department from a university in Dublin, Ireland contacted us on behalf of a student to try and acquire this dissertation, not immediately knowing what the format was. International ILL has been performed for printed dissertations in the past. The university was still interested in receiving a copy of the reel-to-reel dissertation recording, and I have recently set up an in-house digitization station for this size of reels, so I was anxious to complete this request.

However, at CUA students hold the copyright to dissertations, unless stated otherwise. We have recently started to share textual dissertations in an online institutional repository (as PDFs) so this request would not be much different. I had to contact out University General Counsel Office to find out if I could create a digital copy of this tape.

Currently, the Archives allows researchers to use originals of dissertations (textual, and the audio for which we have playing equipment). This is not an archival quality practice, but a practical one that involves the least amount of work; we were also not able to digitize reels until recently. We are also re-thinking a lot of our current policies to include advances in technology.

Is it possible to create a digital copy of this tape for international distribution (sort of like creating a PDF of a paper dissertation)? Is there a specific date that unpublished dissertations become public domain? What steps do we need to take and what sort of permissions would we need to acquire to create a digital copy if we are not immediately able to?

The answer is pending...

Just because I'm an A/V techie...

Just because I'm an A/V techie, doesn't mean I'm a computer techie. My cheat sheet (brought to you by xkcd.com comics:

See the comic in its original form.

Audio Visual? A disclaimer...

My title is "Audio Visual Archivist." What is meant by "Audio Visual?"

It depends...

I work at a small university, where the Archives has a professional staff of 4.5, one (life-saving) paraprofessional, one full-time graduate library professional, and five part-time graduate student workers (history and library science).

My duties include: solicit, accession, manage, process, preserve, serve as reference archivist, and request manager for all non-paper formats except microfilm, but only if the microfilm is a preservation format of a manuscript or university collection (because those fall under their respective larger categories.

I am also the in-house go-to person for any technical questions including computer, hardware, software, and digital formats, though not specifically surrogates or born-digital audio visual formats (even though the main library has computer tech support). I also manage and train students in audio visual knowledge.

Most of my day is spent doing photo requests (corresponding, reference, searching, scanning, metadata). I rarely do anything with audio or moving image media, due to our lack of equipment.

This is my job.

Every Audio Visual Archivist I talk to has a unique experience, and different duties. Every job is defined differently. If you want to be work with any kind of non-paper format, ask a lot of questions first.