When the world ends next December, all of our blathering and fretting over the best way to preserve archival materials will prove to have been in vain. In spite of it all, we trundle ahead with our work like the Sisyphean hero. Normally, I imagine the hill decades or centuries long; if asked my opinion about a new movie or album or current event, I say ask me again in 50 years. But, considering the circumstances, the normal timeline needs accelerating. Thus, the 2011 Archives Year in Review.

The Association for Recorded Sound Collections Technical Committee (ARSC TC) recently announced the release of their “Study of Embedded Metadata Support in Audio Recording Software: Summary of Findings and Conclusions”. AudioVisual Preservation Solutions President Chris Lacinak and Consultant Peter Oleksik played significant roles in co-ordinating the study and authoring the report, along with invaluable contributions [...]

Metadata is an integral component of digital preservation and an essential part of a digital object. Files without appropriate metadata lack the basic means required for computing systems and humans to understand, interpret, or manage them. Effectively, there is no preservation or meaningful access without metadata. This presentation by Chris Lacinak covers the why, what [...]

AudioVisual Preservation Solutions founder and president Chris Lacinak will be representing AVPS at the 44th Annual Association for Recorded Sound Collections Conference in New Orleans, May 19th-22nd. Friday morning Chris will be presenting with Dan Partridge of the Jazz Loft Project on the Artists & Repertoire: Jazz and Blues panel. Dan is a Jazz Loft [...]

April showers bring May conferences. AudioVisual Preservation Solutions continues their dedicated involvement in the Preservation and Archiving communities with upcoming presentations at the Joint Technical Symposium (JTS) and the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) annual conference. JTS is being held May 2-5, 2010 in Oslo, Norway under this year’s theme “Digital Challenges and Digital [...]

Only the successes (or the mega failures) from the deeper past are recalled, giving an skewed sense of what actually happened if one doesn’t do proper research. Without that research, the half-remembered past is not a valid touchstone to base an argument on. An incomplete picture of the past creates a false interpretation of the present.

Chris Lacinak has been invited to speak with Jazz Loft Project Director Sam Stephenson at the February 18th New York Chapter Meeting of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections. This past November Sam published his new book, The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965, and the [...]

Chris Lacinak, founder of AudioVisual Preservation Solutions (AVPS), has been accepted into the technical committees of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) and Association of Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC). As chair of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) Technical Committee on Archiving Restoration and Digital Libraries (TCARDL), Chris now contributes as a member [...]