IASA 2018 Annual Conference

Shanghai Audio-Visual Archives has accumulated a large number of radio and television programs and materials for many years. It has built a whole-process digital media asset management system and provided an online content search and service. In addition to the efficient storage management of these audio-visual archives, we have never stopped research on how to make the audio-visual files more in line with the needs of the users. With the integration of traditional TV media with new media as well as the actual demands on audio-visual archives by culture and education, it has more practical value and social significance to realize the integration and development of audio-visual archives in all directions.
At present, Shanghai Audio-Visual Archives has been exploring an interactive platform to provide audio-visual content services for different users and groups. According to their demands, we are promoting a theme-oriented and knowledgeable management model of audio-visual content with the help artificial intelligence (AI) and other techniques. We are trying to disassemble and combine the mass audio and video materials, carry on the content aggregation with applied requirements as well as provide the content product service with all its variety, thus we can really create new values for historical audio-visual archives.

Last year at IASA 2017 in Berlin, University of Michigan Professors Kelly Askew and Paul Conway presented a status report on a research project designed to explore access options for a collection of 900 radio programs and scripts representing 40 years of broadcasting of Voice of America’s Music Time in Africa (1965-2005). The NEH funded project ends in May 2018, affording an opportunity to showcase preservation and access options for this important collection of radio broadcasts to the African continent. The paper has two sections. First, the presentation demonstrates a custom-designed interface to the collection that is preserved digitally in an enterprise-grade digital repository and streaming service. The primary question in this section concerns the value added by custom access system programming and how the system might be generalized for other collections of sound recordings with associated documentary evidence. Second, the paper exposes some initial findings on the content of the 900 radio programs afforded by the existence of digitized scripts with searchable text, along with metadata that supports geospatial and temporal mapping of the content of the radio programs. The primary question in this section concerns the feasibility of associating Voice of America programming with political, social, and economic activity in a selection of Sub-Saharan nations. The research effort points toward new ways to explore the impact of radio programming in post-colonial Africa.

The Film and Video Library of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation was established in 1965.  It collects and preserves a variety of programmes and ceremonies such as swearing-in of heads of states, independence declarations, Farmers Day celebrations, daily news coverages etc.  As it is with most public archives in our sub-region, a greater part of the collection has been locked away due to obsolete media formats, lack of technical skills to manage the collection, and the climate condition.   Meanwhile this unique collection is expected to be the nation’s repository. I will speak about the GBC collection to the IASA community, highlight the challenges being encountered and use the opportunity to open up for help and collaboration.

Co-edited by Will Prentice and Lars Gaustad, this is the 4th Edition, published in 2017. While the earlier versions concentrated on audio, this new edition is extending these general principles and strategies to include moving images. The tutorial concentrates on the content migration for audio and video documents, the only viable method to preserve their contents in the long-term, because of the instability of original carriers and the obsolescence of replay equipment The principles of optimal signal extraction from original carriers, unmodified transfer to digital archival formats, and the importance of metadata for the authentication of contents will be discussed.

Edited by Dietrich Schüller and Albrecht Häfner, IASA-TC 05 was published in 2014. While IASA-TC 03, presented in another tutorial at this conference, underlines that, ultimately, long-term preservation of audiovisual documents can only be achieved by “eternal” digital content migration, TC 05 explains that carrier preservation has still its important place in audiovisual archiving, as by far not all audiovisual documents have as yet been transferred to digital repositories. Also, IASA-TC 03 strongly recommends that originals be kept for potential later reference. IASA-TC 05 explains how handling and storage of audio and video carriers can be optimised to preserve original holdings, until professional long-term preservation can be organised and financed. In the presentation, reference will be made to specific precautions against the unfavourable climatic conditions in tropical zones.

As more and more collection objects are born-digital and non-physical in nature, archivists must develop core competencies regarding the fundamental nature of digital objects. Just as knowledge of the chemical composition of cellulose (for example) is essential for the care and maintenance of paper materials, the knowledge of file construction at a bit-level is essential for archivist to make careful decisions about what are and are not unique characteristics of a given digital collection object and how best to determine sustainable and safe care and maintenance plans for the digital collection object over time.
This tutorial illustrates the fundamental binary elements of digital audio and video objects, from bits to bytes to formal format structures. The tutorial will demonstrate methods for understanding and interpreting these many technological layers, including how to translate bytes into understandable information based on file format specifications, and how to distinguish file object information from file system information in order to understand the true boundaries of a digital object within a given computer system.

Disaster or emergency management is the discipline of dealing with and avoiding risks. It involves preparing for disaster before it occurs, responding to disaster and rebuilding after natural or human-made disasters. In general, an effective emergency management is an ongoing process, based on a thorough integration of disaster/emergency plans at all that can be used to manage of any kind of heritage institution. This tutorial will present some examples and discuss possible solutions.

Are you in need of a way to provide access to oral histories not recorded in English? Do you dream of creating multilingual metadata for interviews recorded in one language but made accessible in another? In 2016 The University of Kentucky Nunn Center updated the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS) application with multilingual functionalities, creating the capability to synchronize both a transcript/translation, as well as to create a bilingual index, making all of these searchable and synchronized to the corresponding moment in the audio or video. In this half-day workshop, OHMS founder and creator Doug Boyd will demonstrate the multilingual functionalities of OHMS. Through demonstration of a bilingual use case, power users Teague Schneiter and Brendan Coates will walk attendees through each step of the indexing process to prepare a sample bilingual index. Brendan will also demonstrate extensions of the OHMS xml data structure, converting the index into both Matroska and DVD chapter xml. Instructors will also guide attendees to develop workflows to support multilingual indexing.

The concept of “special collections” covers a wide range of notions that commonly refer to rare and unique material archives or cultural institutions possess. Its meaning ranges from precious manuscripts, to a particular material type collection, or an individual’s personal archives. Because these collections are special, they add to the uniqueness of the cultural institution's general collection. However, precisely because they are special, they present specific challenges and require specific treatment. Given the vastness of this notion for the purpose of this tutorial we will narrow it down to one particular kind of special collections: mixed collections that documents of a wide variety of media or carriers, e.g., written documents, photographs, audio, and video recordings. It is customary that such collections remain closed, but there is scarcely an institution, which can handle all forms of documents and recordings in a competent manner. Therefore, various competences should join and collaborate in dealing with such collections. By first attempting to define the main characteristics of mixed collections, this tutorial will then try to outline a framework and a methodical approach that should allow an archive to receive and treat correctly these collections, to describe and contextualize them properly, and to give them an appropriate place in the general collection. Great attention will be paid to the definition of workflows necessary to the management of these special collections.

This tutorial explores all aspects concerning the pre-emphasis and de-emphasis that may be applied to a modulated groove. The characteristics, in terms of frequency vs. amplitude response, of the different cutting and replaying processes (mechanical, electromagnetic, optical, etc.) are comprehensively exposed. The goal is to answer most of the where, why, and how questions, to build a solid background that will help choosing and applying the correct de-emphasis, in both the analog and the digital domains.

The presentation, although supported by a number of sound examples, is very technical, and easier to understand for those who are already familiar with this topic, or who have attended my presentation in the Expert Transfer Techniques series of last year.

Training for TV Ltd has recently prepared an introductory level 5-day training course that provides archivists with the knowledge they will require to understand the role and work of an archivist in TV or radio. The course followed a request from Ilse Assmann for a training course specifically aimed at broadcast archivists and to be delivered to staff in South Africa. It is primarily for those coming to the business with limited technical and practical knowledge of television or radio media and covers the technical side of legacy formats, as well as the design and workings of modern archive and MAM systems, along with discussion and reviews of the major issues which an archivist working in broadcast needs to deal with.

It is proposed that excerpts from this training be offered at the conference to potentially enhance the delegates' own knowledge, but more importantly to give members an opportunity to assess and see what the program can offer.

In addition to an explanation of the course's curriculum and syllabus, it is proposed that two topics from the course are offered as a taster of the content and style. The section on working with videotape will look at the basics of how machines work and the range of tape formats and types an archivist might encounter. The section on working with film will look at types, gauges, and uses of film and film sound and the practicalities of working with film.

In this piece, I discuss the need for a sonic turn in public radio studies to expand our modes of inquiry and bring the field into the 21st century. First, I provide a brief overview of the theoretical benefits of a sonic approach to public radio scholarship. Next, I outline research on radio that exemplifies such an approach. Once the case for sonic thinking is established, I address the practical consideration of acoustic archive accessibility. I argue that scholars studying public radio are in a unique position to work with archivists to make this archive accessible and thereby facilitate a sonic turn through collaboration.

The Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound (RHA) represents one of the greatest audio collections in the United States and is an incredible resource for music lovers, performers, composers, and researchers. As technology advances, our users’ expectations for how to access and interact with our collections change; for example, it is increasingly common for users to carry their personal music libraries with them, via cell phones and computers or via the cloud. In 2017, staff members in RHA were awarded a grant from the New York Public Library (NYPL) to create a portable, secure audiovisual streaming platform to increase outreach and accessibility to the collections. With a Raspberry Pi miniature computer and open source software, we successfully introduced an additional, user-friendly access point for patrons that maintains NYPL’s standard for secure streaming. This virtual “reading room” facilitates easy access to our collection materials for patrons at branch locations across New York City. The Raspberry Pi and supporting open-source software show promise as jumping-off points not only for RHA’s outreach efforts but also for other libraries and research centers who may be inspired to further adapt this model for new and unanticipated purposes.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has funded the University of Michigan Information for a project to develop, test, and deploy education and training resources for teaching digitization standards (IASA, FADGI, and underlying technical documentation) in classrooms, workshops, and on the job.  Resources will be developed independently for digitizing analog audio, analog videotape, and photographic materials (based on FADGI guidelines). The two target audiences for the new resources are (1) educators who teach university students (upper and lower divisions) and (2) managers of digitization labs and services who need to train student workers or upgrade the skills of existing or new staff.  The educational resources will be developed as highly modularized self-guided courses available free online and partially in print on demand.  The purpose of the half-day workshop is to gather a mix of seasoned experts in analog audio and analog videotape digitization together with prospective users of the educational resources.  Guided by the workshop instructor, participants will review components of IASA-TC 03, TC 04, TC 05, and TC 06 (forthcoming) and brainstorm on the content of modules that could serve as a bridge for students and independent learners between technical standards and informed practice. Participants will also develop recommendations on resources that could support proposals for outsourcing digitization work to third-party vendors and grant-writing activities. The workshop could be viewed as allied with and supporting the work of the IASA Training and Education Committee.