Earlier this month the American Archive of Public Broadcasting staff hosted several workshops at the 2017 Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) conference in New Orleans. Their presentations on workflows, crowdsourcing, and best copyright practices are now available online! Be sure to also check out AMIA’s YouTube channel for recorded sessions.
THURSDAY, November 30th
- PBCore Advisory Sub-Committee Meeting
Rebecca Fraimow reported on general activities of the Sub-Committee and the PBCore Development and Training Project. The following current activities were presented:
PBCore Cataloging Tool (Linda Tadic)
PBCore MediaInfo updates (Dave Rice)
ProTrack integration (Rebecca Fraimow)
Updated CSV templates (Sadie Roosa)
PBCore crosswalks (Rebecca Fraimow and Sadie Roosa)
FRIDAY, Dec 1st
- Let the Computer and the Public do the Metadata Work!
Speakers: Karen Cariani, Senior Director, WGBH Media Library and Archives & AAPB Project Director
Tali Singer, Pop Up Archive
Tanya Clement, University of Texas at Austin, School of Information
Archives that hold A/V materials are at a critical point, with many cultural heritage institutions needing to take immediate action to safeguard at-risk media formats before the content they contain is lost forever. Yet, many in the cultural heritage communities do not have sufficient education and training in how to handle the special needs that A/V archive materials present. In the summer of 2015, a handful of archive educators and students formed a pan-institutional group to help foster “educational opportunities in audiovisual archiving for those engaged in the cultural heritage sector.” The AV Competency Framework Working Group is developing a set of competencies for audiovisual archive training of students in graduate-level education programs and in continuing education settings. In this panel, core members of the working group will discuss the main goals of the project and the progress that has been made on it thus far.
- Good Enough to Best, Tiered Born-Digital AV Processing
Speakers: Rebecca Fraimow, Project Manager, WGBH Media Library and Archives
Erica Titkemeyer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Julia Kim, Library of Congress
Born-Digital audiovisual files continue to present a conundrum to archivists in the field today: should they be accepted as-is, transcoded, or migrated? Is transcoding to a recommended preservation format always worth the potential extra storage space and staff time? If so, what are the ideal target specifications? In this presentation, individuals working closely with born-digital audiovisual content from the University of North Carolina, WGBH, and the American Folklife Center at the Library of Conference will present their own use cases involving collections processing practices, from “best practice” to the practical reality of “good enough”. These use cases will highlight situations wherein video quality, subject matter, file size and stakeholder expectations end up playing important roles in directing the steps taken for preservation. From these experiences, the panel will put forth suggestions for tiered preservation decision making, recognizing that not all files should necessarily be treated alike.
- Crowdsourcing Anecdotes
How does the public play a role in making historical AV content accessible? The American Archive of Public Broadcasting has launched two games that engage the public in transcribing and describing 70+ years of audio and visual content comprising more than 50,000 hours.
THE TOOLS:
(Speech-to-Text Transcript Correction) FIX IT is an online game that allows the public to identify and correct errors in our machine-generated transcripts. FIX IT players have exclusive access to historical content and long-lost interviews from stations across the country.
AAPB KALDI is a tool and profile for speech-to-text transcription of video and audio, released by the Pop Up Archive and made available on Github at github.com/WGBH/american-archive-kaldi.
(Program Credits Cataloging) ROLL THE CREDITS is a game that allows the public to identify and transcribe information about the text that appears on the screen in so many television broadcasts. ROLL THE CREDITS asks users to collect this valuable information and classify it into categories that can be added to the AAPB catalog. To accomplish this goal, we’ve extracted frames from uncataloged video files and are asking for help to transcribe the important information contained in each frame.
SATURDAY, Dec 2nd
- Put it on your Bucket List: Navigating Copyright to Expose Digital AV Collections at Scale
Speakers: Casey Davis Kaufman, Associate Director, WGBH Media Library and Archives & Project Manager, American Archive of Public Broadcasting
Jay Fialkov, Deputy General Counsel, WGBH
Hope O’Keeffe, Associate General Counsel, Library of Congress
Digitized collections often remain almost as inaccessible as they were on their original analog carriers, primarily due to institutional concerns about copyright infringement and privacy. The American Archive of Public Broadcasting has taken steps to overcome these challenges, making available online more than 22,000 historic programs with zero take-down notices since the 2015 launch. This copyright session will highlight practical and successful strategies for making collections available online. The panel will share strategies for: 1) developing template forms with standard terms to maximize use and access, 2) developing a rights assessment framework with limited resources (an institutional “Bucket Policy”), 3) providing limited access to remote researchers for content not available in the Online Reading Room, and 4) promoting access through online crowdsourcing initiatives.
- Building the AAPB: Inter-Institutional Preservation and Access Workflows
Speakers: Charles Hosale, Special Projects Assistant, WGBH/AAPB
Leslie Bourgeois, Archivist, Louisana Public Broadcasting
Ann Wilkens, Archivist, Wisconsin Public Television
Rachel Curtis, AAPB Project Coordinator, Library of Congress
The American Archive of Public Broadcasting seeks to preserve and make accessible significant historical public media content, and to coordinate a national effort to save at-risk public media recordings. In the four years since WGBH and the Library of Congress began stewardship of the project, significant steps have been taken towards accomplishing these goals. The effort has inspired workflows that function constructively, beginning with preservation at local stations and building to national accessibility on the AAPB. Archivists from two contributing public broadcasters will present their institutions’ local preservation and access workflows. Representatives from WGBH and the Library of Congress will discuss collaborating with contributors and the AAPB’s digital preservation and access workflows. By sharing their institutions’ roles and how collaborators participate, the speakers will present a full picture of the AAPB’s constructive inter-institutional work. Attendees will gain knowledge of practical workflows that facilitate both local and national AV preservation and access.
- Preservation is Painless: A Guide to Outsourced AV Digitization Project Management
Speakers: Biz Maher Gallo, George Blood Audio/Video/Film/Data
Charles Hosale, WGBH Media Library & Archives
Robin Pike, University of Maryland Libraries
Emily Vinson, University of Houston Libraries
Rebecca Holte, New York Public Library
Erica Titkemeyer, UNC Chapel Hill Libraries
Kimbery Tarr, New York University Libraries
As an increasing number of audiovisual formats become obsolete and the available hours remaining on deteriorating playback machines decrease, it is essential for institutions to digitize their AV holdings to ensure long-term preservation and access. With an estimated hundreds of millions of items to digitize, it is impractical, even impossible, that institutions would be able to perform all of this work in-house before time runs out. While this can seem like a daunting process, why learn the hard way when you can benefit from the experiences of others? From those embarking on their first outsourced AV digitization project to those who have completed successful projects but are looking for ways to refine and scale up their process, everyone has something to learn from these speakers about managing AV digitization projects from start to finish.
- Poster Session – Design for Context: Cataloging and Linked Data for Exposing National Educational Television (NET) Content
Presenters: Sadie Roosa, Project Manager, National Educational Television Collection Catalog Project
Rachel Curtis, AAPB Project Coordinator, Library of Congress
Christopher Pierce, Metadata Specialist, Library of Congress
How do you bring together a collection of broadcast materials scattered in various geographical locations across the country? National Education Television (NET), the precursor to PBS, distributed programs nationally to educational television stations from 1954-1972. Although this collection is tied together through provenance, it presents a challenge to processing due to differing approaches in descriptive practices across many repositories over many years. By aggregating inventories into one catalog and describing titles more fully, the NET Collection Catalog will help institutions holding these materials make informed preservation decisions. By its conclusion, AAPB will publish an online list of NET titles annotated with relevant descriptive information culled from NET textual records that will greatly improve discoverability of NET materials for archivists, scholars, and the general public. Examples of specific cataloging issues, including contradictory metadata documentation and legacy records, inconsistent titling practices, and the existence of international version will be explored.
ABOUT THE AAPB
The American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) is a collaboration between the Library of Congress and the WGBH Educational Foundation to coordinate a national effort to preserve at-risk public media before its content is lost to posterity and provide a central web portal for access to the unique programming that public stations have aired over the past 70 years. To date, over 50,000 hours of television and radio programming contributed by more than 100 public media organizations and archives across the United States have been digitized for long-term preservation and access. The entire collection is available on location at WGBH and the Library of Congress, and almost 25,000 programs are available online at americanarchive.org.
blog.americanarchive.org 