‘Ulu ‘ulu: PBPF Fellow Kimo Nichols on Digitizing “Biography Hawaii”

I’ve been fascinated by audio/visual archives since I began my career in libraries a decade ago and I’ve had the great fortune to have previously worked at one (albeit in the Circulation side of things) at the Wong Audiovisual Center in the former Sinclair Library at the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa. I’d been of out of the a/v archives world and working in a different UH-Manoa library department since 2019, so I consider myself very fortunate to have had AAPB’s Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship program brought to my attention last year by my advisor in UH-Mānoa’s LIS program and subsequently to have been chosen for one of the fellowships. It was the PBPF Fellowship that brought me to ‘Ulu ‘ulu: The Henry Ku’ualoha Giugni Moving Image Archive of Hawai`i and back into the fascinating world of a/v archives, where I’ve had an immeasurably stimulating and personally enjoyable hands-on learning experience working on a year long video digitization project.

Since September of 2022 I’ve been working on digitizing, creating technical metadata and writing cataloging descriptions for the raw interview footage of a Hawaii-produced historical documentary series, Biography Hawai`i, which originally aired on Hawai`i Public Television station KHET in the early 2000s. My work week was split between the digitization and technical metadata component of the project carried out in ‘Ulu ‘ulu’s “digital room” under the supervision of Digital Specialist Robbie Omura and the descriptive cataloging component under the supervision of Assistant Archivist and Cataloger Koa Luke, which I worked on from home. The overall project was overseen by ‘Ulu ‘ulu Head Archivist Janel Quirante. 

My workflow process was as follows: 

• Initial physical inspection and cleaning of the Betacam SP video tapes to be digitized.
• Entry of the physical inspection information into the MAVIS database
• Digitization and simultaneous monitoring of the individual Betacam SP tapes using AJA software
• Recording of the individual technical metadata of each tape in a Google spreadsheet
• Writing descriptive metadata for the raw footage of each tape & selecting a roughly 3 minute snippet of content for use as a segment “trailer” on ‘Ulu’ ulu’s website.
• Transcoding of the resultant preservation files into intermediate and proxy files

Quite a bit of the material I worked on I found to be revelatory. I was completely ignorant of even the name Harriet Bouslog before working with the Biography Hawaii footage, let alone the huge impact her legal work had on improving the socio-economic conditions of Hawai`i’s workers. I was similarly unaware of the life of investigative journalist Koji Ariyoshi and his relentless reporting on behalf of Hawai`i’s disenfranchised. Although a bit more knowledgeable on the subject of hula, the many hours of interviews and archival footage I digitized on the life and cultural impact of Ma’iki Aiu Lake were even more fascinating to me, just given my personal interest in hula and Hawaiian music. Getting to hear the expertise and candor of Hawaiian cultural authorities and practitioners such as Robert Cazimero, Kalena Silva and Puakea Nogelmeier reminisce about Ma’iki and explain the reasons behind her hallowed place in the Hawaiian cultural renaissance of the 1960s and 70s was a unique educational experience.

However, by far the biggest surprise that I encountered during my fellowship at ‘Ulu ‘ulu was the amount (not a ton, but enough to be supremely interesting and entertaining) of “regrettable” comments made off camera by both film crew personnel and interview subjects. These comments, largely uttered in innocence 20+ years ago when the footage was shot, were, of course, caught by a “hot” mic and saved for posterity for a PBPF Fellow to hear two decades later. Additionally, I came across some seemingly libelous comments (obviously not a lawyer, though) made by an interviewee in regards to some of Hawai`i’s more recent historical figures. This particular footage was wisely left on the cutting room floor by the filmmakers, in my opinion. After talking to others in the archival field that have previously worked with raw interview footage, I learned that “bloopers” of this sort are actually captured “accidentally” fairly often; it’s just one of the aspects that makes this kind of archival work both fascinating and fun. However, deciding whether or not to include such footage or to edit it out of the final version of a film is also obviously an artistic/ethical/legal challenge that an audiovisual archivist must deftly navigate! Overall though, I have to selfishly admit that this issue made my experience at ‘Ulu ‘ulu that much richer.

Apart from being fortunate enough to benefit daily from the kindness, patience and amazing expertise of the staff, I’d say my favorite aspect of interning at ‘Ulu’ulu was simply being able to soak up as much as I could of all the incredible stories, history and images available in its archives. I was allowed to work with materials that really broadened and furthered my perspective of Hawai’i and its people. Thus, my advice for any future PBPF Fellow would be first and foremost to just really soak it all in and enjoy every moment of the overall experience. Ideally, this learning experience, like the one I was fortunate enough to go through, will comprise more than the technical nuts and bolts of the digitization process. I think that if future interns keep an open mind, love learning and show respect for the materials they’ve been entrusted to work with, the PBPF Fellowship will be an incredibly rewarding opportunity to work with an amazing group of industry professionals committed to helping make sure stories of the kind housed at ‘Ulu ‘ulu are told through the preservation of and access to moving images.