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AVPS Funds New AMIA Scholarship to Honor World Day for Audiovisual Heritage

Josh — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 11:58:58 +0000

In celebration of World Day for Audiovisual Heritage 2010, AudioVisual Preservation Solutions, in collaboration with the Association of Moving Image Archivists is pleased to announce the YADA! Scholarships for Education in Fundraising (PDF of news release). Three annual scholarships will funded by AVPS and awarded through the AMIA Awards Committee aimed at providing moving image and sound archivists with opportunities for education in fundraising.

Background:

On World Day for Audiovisual Heritage 2009, AVPS announced the Your Archive Deserves Advocacy! initiative (http://www.avpreserve.com/avpsresources/about-yada/), an effort focused on promoting the people and stories behind archives as well as providing resources that support advocacy. As part of the YADA! initiative, and in celebration of World Day for Audiovisual Heritage 2010, AVPS is funding three separate scholarship awards to help offset the cost of attending Foundation Center training classes. The Foundation Center is a national nonprofit service organization whose mission is to strengthen the nonprofit sector by providing information and resources that enable improved knowledge and access to philanthropic organizations. Their in-person and web-based workshops offer guidance and resources to help organizations obtain grants and other funding opportunities. The Foundation Center has regional centers for resources and training in Atlanta, Cleveland, New York, San Francisco, and Washington DC. For more information on the Foundation Center and the classes they offer, visit foundationcenter.org.

How does Fundraising Relate to Advocacy?

The activities involved in caring for audiovisual collections extend well beyond daily efforts such as arrangement, cataloging, reformatting, and providing access. These other activities involve an equally extensive set of endeavors that can roughly be defined as advocacy, including:

- acquisition of funding
- communication with administration and other organizational departments
- public promotion and outreach
- planning
- community involvement, and more

Becoming an effective advocate for archival collections means becoming a proactive participant in the management and planning of all aspects of their preservation and long-term maintenance. This includes the ability to articulate the importance, needs, and goals of the collection to a broad audience, including potential funders.

The Scholarship:

Three applicants per year will receive registration to onsite or online Foundation Center classes plus actual travel cost reimbursement, up to $1000 total combined per award. Calls for submissions will take place in the spring through the auspices of the AMIA Awards and Scholarship Committee and awards will be announced in the fall.

Look for the announcement in the spring, and thank you to the AMIA Awards and Scholarship Committee and the AMIA Board for their help in this and continued support of education in archiving and preservation.

The Organizations:

AudioVisual Preservation Solutions
http://www.avpreserve.com
facebook.com/AVPreserve
twitter.com/AVPreserve

Association of Moving Image Archivists
http://www.amianet.org
twitter.com/AMIAnet

Collective Individualism

Josh — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 17:31:41 +0000

New York Times Columnist (and fellow Oregonian) Nicholas Kristof was interviewed on WNYC’s On The Media last month about his approach to being what they termed an “advocacy journalist.”

The gist of it is, advocacy seems to be much more effective when approached as the story of a single individual, that the desire to give aid or help dampens when faced with too many people to think about. I was reminded of a section in Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being where she writes of the difficulty of trying to comprehend the thousands of deaths caused in a South Seas ferry accident. Overwhelmed by the numbers, she experiences more pain over not being able to feel for their suffering than she can muster for their actual suffering. However, as the research study Kristof cites suggests, that decrease in sympathy and the impetus to help doesn’t even need that many people to start taking effect; it begins when the number of people rises to two.

Now I’m not sure if we should be patting ourselves on the back or preparing a suit for copyright infringement, but Kristof’s take on the issue is the same as the base building block of our YADA! initiative — to tell individual success stories about archivists as a means of advocacy and of inspiration to others.

But seriously, it’s a widespread concept used across many sectors in various approaches. We chose to tell success stories because there seems to be plenty of focus on the opposite as people get caught up in the list of problems laid out ahead, almost inversing the old quote about success having a thousand fathers. Making people aware of the challenges faced in media archiving has its place in garnering support, but maintaining that backing and further encouraging its growth means showing the positive results of support.

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I think the idea expressed by Kristof and in the study can be extrapolated out to other areas of conceptual disconnect. We’ve written before about using specific examples or designing smaller scale, more quickly accomplished projects when starting out with your advocacy efforts to administration or funders. It can also be a way to not feel overwhelmed by 100 Paige boxes full of generic blank audiocassettes, by finding ways to think about them as “individual” segments to be approached one at a time. Every piece of media has a story — both as an object with a history and as content — but that’s something that can be lost when faced with the masses of reels and cassettes and unorganized file structures. Maybe stepping back to “listen” to and relate the individual stories of our media will help us better be able to listen to our media content into the future.

— Joshua Ranger

AVPS Releases New Grant Tracking Calendar (YADA!Cal)

Josh — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 20:32:21 +0000

We all know the drill: an e-mail comes through the listserv reminding us that the deadline for the Such & Such Grant for Thus & Thus is two weeks away. This sends us barreling headlong in a mad dash to ferret out some project, any project to cobble together some sort of application for…Or we sit and, before deleting the e-mail from our inbox, think, “Aw, man, I gotta apply for that next year…”

With this in mind AudioVisual Preservation Solutions, as part of our Your Archive Deserves Advocacy! (YADA!) initiative, has developed a free internet calendar that lists deadlines, reminders, links, and short descriptions of grants available for media archiving and preservation related projects. Using the .ics file format through the assistance of iCal Exchange, you can subscribe to the calendar and its updates through iCal, Outlook, Google Calendar, or a number of other calendar programs. Subscribing to the calendar feed will insert the “events” into your calendar program of choice so that you can more easily track and plan for future granting cycles. Events will be defined as their own set within your calendar which you can display or hide as you see fit through your program’s settings. As new deadlines are announced or new granting opportunities discovered we will update the main calendar. Those changes will be reflected in your own subscription.

Check out our Tools page or the Subscription Instructions for more information about the YADA! Archiving & Preservation Grants Calendar (YADA!Cal).

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Sometimes it seems funding opportunities do arise suddenly and require a quick reaction to capitalize on. However, any Development Department will tell you that those opportunities are a result of planning, cultivation, and engagement, and that the overall approach to establishing sustainability must be proactive, not reactive. Becoming a better advocate for your collections means becoming more aware and communicating more about the issues that can affect your collection both negatively and positively. One way to start filling in some of the gaps in awareness is to be prepared, and help prepare others in your organization, for funding opportunities before they flutter by again.

— Joshua Ranger

YADA! Archiving & Preservation Grants Calendar (YADA!Cal)

Josh — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 20:28:05 +0000

The YADA! Archiving & Preservation Grants Calendar (YADA!Cal) is a freely available listing of deadlines, reminders, links, and short descriptions of grants available for media archiving and preservation projects. AVPS has aggregated the grant information and is publishing it using the .ics file format via iCal Exchange, a free clearinghouse for the publishing of internet calendars. The .ics file format (iCalendar) is a data transfer standard that enables the sharing of calendars in Apple’s iCalendar, Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar, and other calendar programs. Subscribing to the YADA! Archiving & Preservation Grants Calendar will automatically display grant dates and information in your calendar as AVPS continually updates and refines the information, making it easier for you to track, research, and plan ahead for potential funding opportunities. Visit http://www.avpreserve.com/yadacal-subscription-instructions for more information and subscription instructions.

5 Tips for Effective Advocacy

Josh — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 12:38:27 +0000

From The 5 Tips Series, YADA! Presents

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

Your Archive Deserves Advocacy! (YADA!)

Josh — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:13:19 +0000

YOUR ARCHIVE DESERVES ADVOCACY ! (YADA!)

In support of UNESCO World Day for Audiovisual Heritage (October 27, 2009) and American Archives Month, and in celebration of the work being performed by archivists worldwide, AudioVisual Preservation Solutions (AVPS)requests your participation in a project designed to garner support for audiovisual archive preservation planning and project implementation from influencers, policy makers and funding organs.

As consultants and advocates working with audiovisual archives, we contribute to and witness preservation success stories on a daily basis. We understand that those successes were built on sustained long term efforts and collaboration with other internal/external stakeholders, and through community information exchange. Our celebration of these successes can lead to the kind of funding support all archives need in reaching their goals. We are asking you for your favorite audiovisual preservation experience at your archive. These stories will provide encouragement to other archivists by showing what can be achieved in similar circumstances.

These stories will be published on our website, and some will be selected for use in our ongoing efforts to inform private and public funding decision makers, both of what is being achieved, and what can be achieved with their support.

Our first inclusion is dedicated in support of the spirit underlying UNESCO World Day for Audiovisual Heritage and American Archives Month, and will profile the ongoing story of “The Jazz Loft Project”, www.jazzloftproject.org/index.php an excellent example of how a person or organization convinced of the cultural value of previously inaccessible audiovisual content was able to garner the support necessary to both make unique materials accessible, and to preserve them for posterity.

Because all archives deserve advocacy, your story deserves to be told.

Please contact AudioVisual Preservation Solutions at www.avpreserve.com/you , or send us an e-mail at info@avpreserve.com , or call us at 347-241-2920 to leave contact information. We will follow up with guidance on telling your story. Please Support the preservation projects of the archive community overall by getting your story told.

We will provide periodic updates on subsequent phases of this project as it progresses, and a blog will be posted on our website on Wednesday, October 27^th in celebration of UNESCO World day for Audiovisual Heritage.

Thank you for your participation, and we wish you success on all of your preservation projects.