AudioVisual Preservation Solutions released its sixth annual original greeting card for the 2011 holiday season. This year’s card features an illustration of the first commercially available 3/4″ U-matic deck in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of its initial release to consumers and significance in the wider adoption of videotape beyond the television studio. Also available [...]

So my associative experience with 16mm film projection? Some combination of awe over moon landings, malnourishment (70s health food was a much different [soy-based] beast than what is available today), and primarily discomfort and slight concerns over my safety in case I made a reference to Loni Anderson or Soap. In my mind, viewing a film film in a non-theatrical venue equates to nervousness, low level fear, and hunger.

Integration and collaboration between departments is an essential component of organizational success today -– sharing resources, eliminating redundancy, and open communication help prevent the waste and lack of innovation that can doom an organization to irrelevancy and worse. However, the people who should be in control of setting policies for file management and for selection and implementation of asset management tools — the archivists and records managers out there — have ceded too much ground to a pure IT mindset.

AudioVisual Preservation Solutions Senior Consultant Kara Van Malssen will be speaking with New York Public Radio/WNYC Archive Manager John Passmore this Friday at the 2011 Association of Moving Image Archivists Digital Asset Symposium in Hollywood, CA. The Symposium provides a non-judgmental space for organizations to present case studies of current digital asset management projects in [...]

In the field of film preservation, cinephilia has often been a driving force. However, there has been a gnawing concern in the back of mind that the worm will turn…or has turned. It seems that fetishization of the object – the reification of film, video, or whatever carrier – can equally be a detriment to preservation.

AVPS President Chris Lacinak’s article “Embedded metadata in WAVE files: a look inside issues and tools” hit the street (and the information superhighway) today in the newest International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives Journal (No 37, July 2011). A PDF version of the article and journal are available to IASA members for free on [...]

Do we know what we are preserving, and are we making the right choices? Have we developed good practices for working with the private sector? Do we have adequate funding models for sustainable digital preservation? Do we know how to best valorize our collections in today’s evolving landscape?

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 [...]

I guess it’s a sign that I’m not a kid reading comic books in the 1980s anymore, but the two most interesting things to me about the series were 1) my amazement at the astonishingly clunky or just lame superhero/villain names, and 2) the fact that The Joker kills Ted Turner stand-in Harold J Standish III in order to steal ownership to the copyrights over colorized silent comedies.

by Dave Rice and Stefan Elnabli – October 28, 2010 Due to the susceptibility and challenges of both digital and analog carriers, data must be periodically moved from one carrier to another within a preservation process. When analog data is migrated from its original carrier to a new digital carrier, the analog data is ultimately [...]