The increasing number of digital objects under our guardianship as archivists will require a greater convergence between IT and archival knowledge sets in order to develop effective preservation strategies. One area of great concern for the integrity and persistence of digital audio and video files is the selection of file formats and codecs…Though this is also an area where there is a great lack of certainty and clarity on the issue.

This paper by Chris Lacinak lays out a clear explanation of what codecs are, how they are used, and what their selection and application means to archives. Also provided are 10 recommendations that will help you in the selection and management of codecs in an archival setting.

5 Tips for Effective Advocacy

Becoming an effective advocate for your collections means becoming a proactive participant in the management and planning of their preservation and long term maintenance. The amount of work to do and the costs can feel overwhelming, but things will never change until you take charge, make a plan, and actively seek the resources you need. Here are 5 tips on how you can start to manage your collections rather than letting your collections manage you.

1. Learn a New Language
Every career field (and sub-field) has its own specialized lingo that makes perfect sense to those steeped in the relevant issues or intra-professional communication, but to outsiders much of that language sounds like nonsense or may have a different meaning within their own lingo-istic group. Take some time to think about how the person you’re advocating to would best understand your concerns and issues so that you become a clearer, more efficient communicator…and educator.

2. Be Smart, Not Alarmist
Preservation has long tended to be a reactive field – there isn’t the impetus to save something until it is on the verge of disaster. While this kind of approach has worked at times in the past, it is not 100% effective and tends towards a sky-is-falling attitude (Nitrate will explode for no reason and all film is on the razor’s edge of decay…). At some point people become inured to this type of apocalyptic argument, and then we also end up having to spend a lot of time after the fact disabusing people of misconceptions (nitrate is stable if handled correctly, and film is an excellent medium). Instead, draw on the wealth of research into media longevity and decay, the effects of storage conditions, and means of access. The logical presentation of Issue, Solution, Result will ultimately create better support from grantors and administration, more success, and better piece of mind than merely vocalizing worry and woe.

3. Be Specific
General requests get a general response which are generally difficult to get follow through on. Like with history told from the bottom up, we tend to relate better to the personal or specific. Arm yourself with meaningful details – facts, stories about certain items or preservation efforts, or revealing problem areas – and meaningful outcomes – specific projects with discernible endpoints that can be more easily quantified. Quality is a necessary goal of preservation efforts, but facts, numbers, and specifics give a toehold to begin comprehending the scope of necessary work and the productive use of granted or allocated resources.

4. Plan Big, Start Small
Managing an archive is an ultra marathon, but like training for a marathon you can’t just decide to pop out and run 20 miles one day. You need to plan the steps along the way that will provide the framework for the larger goal. Start off with achievable goals that produce a final result you can measure against and build upon so that you’ll be ready for the big race when it comes. Successfully completing goals in smaller projects will get work done while also providing experience or acting as a proof of concept for a larger project. This will not only help you avoid frustration at not being able to immediately address everything in the collection, but it will also show grantors and development officers that you can establish, manage, and complete projects. This will help them trust you, and you trust yourself, with managing larger scale efforts down the road.

5. Be Confident
You are a trained professional. You know your collection and your field of expertise better than any administrator or granting agency. Speak with confidence and conviction, and present your concerns as quantified problems, solutions and plans rather than as complaints. No one else will believe in your projects if you don’t, and people will react more positively to clear, identifiable actions.

DOWNLOAD THE PDF HERE

— Joshua Ranger

DV tapes are not a preservation medium. As the support for DV tape technology gradually declines, it is imperative to begin migrating DV content from tapes to files for storage and ongoing preservation of the content. In the migration process, the technical nature of DV tapes frequently causes issues generally described as “glitchy” or “finicky”. DV tapes often perform differently from one play to the next and across playback devices. DV Analyzer provides an automated way to monitor and report on the accuracy of the migration process.

DV Analyzer is a technical quality control and reporting tool that examines DV streams in order to report errors in the tape-to-file transfer process. DV Analyzer also reports on technical metadata and patterns within DV streams such as changes in DV time code, changes in recording date and time markers, first and last frame markers within individual recordings, and more. To those concerned with preservation and archiving, this means that you now have the ability to automatically monitor integrity during reformatting of DV tapes and extract meaningful metadata from DV files.

AVPS is pleased to offer DV Analyzer free of charge to the AV preservation community which we serve. DV Analyzer is licensed by AudioVisual Preservation Solutions under the open source GNU General Public License.

For more information on DV Analyzer, or to download it go to: http://www.avpreserve.com/avpsresources/tools

To request specific information about the product go to: http://www.avpreserve.com/you/

Or e-mail us at info@avpreserve.com

We look forward to hearing your comments and suggestions about DVAnalyzer.

Be sure to catch up with David Rice, Chris Lacinak, or Joshua Ranger of AVPS at the AMIA conference this week. They can also answer your questions about DVAnalyzer.

This workshop consists of three presentations from a group of five experts. These presentations will present case studies of projects in which they have been involved. The projects span all relevant content and media types including documents, still images, moving image and sound. The presenters will share their valuable experiences, focusing on covering concerns and questions that many NYART members are, or will soon be asking as they embark on their own projects.

The Speakers will be Leala Abbot – Digital Asset Librarian, Enfatico; Einar Brendalen – Image Systems Analyst, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Jonathan Marmor – Manager of IT and Broadband Operations, Thirteen/WNET New York; David Rice – Digital Media Archivist, Thirteen/WNET New York; and Sunny Yoon – Digital Resources Coordinator, The City University of New York, Office of Library Services.

Development and implementation of these systems is a topic that has been, or will soon be tackled for the first time in many organizations. For those organizations already beyond this initial milestone, the challenge and experience serve as practice while they look forward to repeating the process many more times to come.