As we argued in Meeting the Challenge of Media Preservation, not only do we have valuable material on the IU Bloomington campus at risk, but we also have expertise and experience we can leverage to do something about this challenge.  Much of our experience was shaped in service of multiple preservation projects.  These projects produce much more than the preservation of valuable materials – they also forge strong partnerships between campus units, create tools, and stimulate research into methodologies and workflows that we can use, improve, and adapt.  In other words, when used to their full potential, these projects are stepping stones – each one positions us for what comes next.

Anthony Guest-Scott at a video preservation station at the Archives of Traditional Music

Just so with AHEYM, The Archives of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memories project (the acronym means “homeward” in Yiddish).  AHEYM is a digital video collection of approximately 800 hours of language interviews with 350 Yiddish speakers collected by IU professors Dov-Ber Kerler and Jeffrey Veidlinger along with their colleagues Dovid Katz and Moisei Lemster during ten fieldwork expeditions conducted between 2002 and 2009. The materials consist primarily of ethnographic, linguistic, and oral history interviews with Yiddish speakers, many of whom are Holocaust survivors.  The recordings also include musical performances, folklore, and footage of contemporary Jewish life in Eastern Europe as well as historical sites of Jewish memory in locales in the region.

The AHEYM collection is being accessioned into the Archives of Traditional Music (ATM) at IU and will ultimately be accessible online.  Here is a sample:

Most of the collection was recorded onto MiniDV tapes and you might think that this relatively recent digital format is easy to preserve. There are two basic approaches: a transcoding approach in which an audiovisual signal is captured complete with whatever error correction was necessary or a ‘native’ approach (sometimes called bit scraping) in which a bit-for-bit data stream is captured. There are significant advantages to the latter approach, including capture of embedded metadata that identifies errors and enables an assessment of the integrity of the transfer. This better supports preservation principles. It also results in a more efficient workflow that takes advantage of software tools and automated data analysis.

Simple, right? Just copy the data.  But it’s not quite that simple:  MiniDV is a finicky consumer level digital format and the data is contained on a physical (“analog,” in a sense) surface—magnetic tape. Nearly every transfer will result in a slightly different set of errors.  So how do you design a preservation workflow that addresses this characteristic of the medium?

To our knowledge, few models for DV tape preservation workflows exist.  Building upon prior personnel and video experience from the EVIA Digital Archive project, incorporating principles and best practices from Sound Directions at the ATM, and consulting with AVPS (AudioVisual Preservation Solutions), we built a robust workflow around free, open source, and/or low-cost software tools allowing us to automatically generate quality control data for every frame of captured video without an attended (monitored) transfer.  And by putting this into practice and evaluating the results, we came up with:

1. A system of red flags we could use to suggest alternative preservation strategies for particular problematic tapes

2. A means for evaluating an overall sense of transfer “performance”

3. A method for identifying error regions based on these criteria:  a) Are they detectable at playback speed and full frame size?  b) Do they obfuscate significant content, and, of course, c) Are they present on the source?

Right now, we have finished processing close to 600 of the 800 tapes.  For more information on our DV preservation workflow, please email Anthony Guest-Scott at aguestscott@gmail.com.

// Anthony Guest-Scott

Program Notes from Pressler's Concert. (Click to view larger)

Legendary pianist Menahem Pressler’s 1982 faculty concert performance of Dvořák’s Piano Quintet in A major with the International String Quartet was heard on the Bloomington campus last week for the first time in many years. Carried on three reels of Scotch 208 open reel tape, the performance was the first one digitized as part of the Cook Music Library’s partnership with the Media Preservation Initiative’s Indiana Media Preservation and Access Center (IMPAC) start-up project.

The Music Library holds the largest number of media recordings—more than 200,000—on the Bloomington campus. Well over 50,000 of these recordings document Jacobs School of Music (JSOM) live performances dating from the 1940s to the present. The Jacobs School has historically ranked as one of the finest music conservatories in the world, so when it came time to choose content for the IMPAC start-up project there was an embarrassment of riches and some tough choices to make.

JSOM audio engineer Tony Tadey is working on the start-up project two days per week as part of the Music Library’s collaboration with the Media Preservation Initiative. To select content for the project he drew upon a list of priorities from Music Library staff and the magic of Pressler’s rendition was not only heard again but preserved. It will be accessible via Variations, the IU online audio delivery system where students and faculty can access files for listening.

These recordings are part of a batch of 14 tapes featuring Pressler as well as his Beaux Arts Trio that were chosen for this first wave of preservation action. Because this content is considered of very high value, they will be transferred using a 1:1 workflow. That is, Tadey will digitize one tape at a time, fully monitoring each from beginning to end, to ensure that the resulting files are of the highest quality.

In addition to 1:1 transfers, there are contexts in which a more efficient parallel transfer workflow–the simultaneous transfer and monitoring of more than one source–is appropriate. For the start-up project, Tadey has selected approximately 50 open reel tapes for parallel transfer, all containing University opera performances of Madama Butterfly from the early 1970s to the late 1990s. These recordings are considered good candidates for parallel transfer in part because they are predictable and professional. They contain similar content that is well recorded and placed onto the tapes in similar ways, and they are all the same brand: Scotch 208, a commonly used tape that has no known major issues.

Tony Tadey performing a 1:1 transfer (happily)

In the parallel transfer workflow, Tadey simultaneously digitizes two open reel tapes (and since all are stereo, four channels of audio) which are then saved as two distinct stereo files. While there are efficiency gains from this method there is also increased risk, so a number of safeguards are built into this workflow to assure that preservation quality work is achieved. This includes monitoring both tapes at all times with smooth automated switching that brings each into focus in turn for a pre-determined length of time. What results are numerous versions of Madama Butterfly that are efficiently preserved and quickly made accessible to faculty and students on Variations for comparative purposes.

Work on Music Library holdings will continue for the duration of the start-up project and into the future after the IMPAC is built.

// Mike Lee and Mike Casey

So how is enchantment part of this picture?

Several successful systems exist for ranking the research value of collections of non-time-based media, such as manuscripts or still images. However, none of them seems suitable for assessing the various collections of time-based media found at IU, which leads us to ask: How does the value of time-based media differ from that of other archival formats?

In certain contexts, time-based media are perceived simply as carriers of information that could be expressed just as well—and perhaps more conveniently—in writing. Oral historians often take this position, for example, by treating sound recordings as the raw material for definitive transcriptions.

But this is where enchantment enters into the equation. Sound recordings and moving images can marshal a different power than the written word. According to a number of writers, they “humanize” and “bring to life” events, “stir the emotions,” “transport us,” and enable us to “listen in on history, to hear it again as it happened,” having greater “impact” and giving a more “comprehensive” understanding than written sources. These claims center on a particular experience that time-based media offer and are concerned more with vividness of impact than factual documentation—something that rings true for all of us who have felt the magic of a compelling audio recording or an enchanting film.

Paper documents might also help “bring events to life” but we find that time-based media are more often perceived as sources of heightened experience. And that makes a difference in how we assess their value.

There’s also the matter of what it means to “quote” an item. Traditionally, a researcher would transcribe and quote the words of an archival paper document when presenting research in print. But audio or video/film can be incorporated more directly into what users do or make, for instance by inserting it into radio or TV documentaries, into new creative works, into the classroom, into ebooks, or into conference presentations—taking advantage of the heightened experience such objects can offer. In general, the uses of primary time-based audiovisual content seem less likely to be limited to what has been ordinarily considered “research” than are the uses of primary written source material.

This is not to argue that time-based media don’t have research value—in fact, the information they offer for research purposes can differ qualitatively from that available from other sources. For example, researchers studying the gestures and intonations of an impassioned orator or the subtle stylistic nuances of a celebrated musical performance are likely to find time-based media indispensable. Not only can time-based media enchant, then, but they can also help us to understand whatever it is that enchants us.

The Four Functions of Time-Based Media

The “value” of a recording or film can be assessed in terms of its prospective functions for both custodians and users. We suggest that these functions fall into four broad categories:

1. Experiential

The recording (or film) enables someone to have an aesthetically heightened experience. This might be compared to the literary value of a text or the artistic value of visual art—a highly subjective call, but one that is nevertheless intuitively powerful. Does listening to an audio recording give the listener goose bumps? Does watching a film transport the viewer vividly back into another time, or might it enchant the community for a night in the IU Cinema?

2. Research

The recording enables someone to make a new contribution to knowledge or it provides evidence or data in a research endeavor. The knowledge should be “new” (or at least “rediscovered”) in the context of some substantial community—perhaps an academic field, but not necessarily.

3. Instruction

The recording enables someone to convey or acquire existing knowledge. This includes its use in teaching, including self-instruction, but also everyday consultation as a reference source. The emphasis here is on well-established factual information.

4. Production

The recording enables someone to incorporate its content into a new work. This encompasses transcriptions (e.g., in a book or article) as well as direct incorporation of audiovisual content (e.g., into a radio or TV documentary).

These functions of time-based media inform the criteria used to assess the value of media collections in our emerging selection for preservation tool.

// Patrick Feaster and Mike Casey

The State of Recorded Sound Preservation in the United States: A National Legacy at Risk in the Digital Age  -CLIR/Library of Congress

The Media Preservation Initiative (MPI) at IU Bloomington is embarking upon a campus-wide media preservation prioritization process beginning spring semester 2012. See the previous post (Why Prioritize?) for a discussion of why prioritization is important within our context.

We are currently developing and testing a prioritization process and plan to begin work with campus units early in the spring semester. Our charge is to deliver by June 30 a prioritization plan for the first five years of media preservation work. This project will be carried out by MPI Director of Media Preservation Services, Mike Casey, and MPI assistant, Patrick Feaster, assisted by the SMART team (see the blog post Get SMART).

-Stephen R. Covey

Several lively conversations at the Association of Moving Image Archivists conference a few weeks ago centered on the selection for preservation process. Why prioritize—can’t (or shouldn’t) we save it all? That was one viewpoint, further refined by: Why prioritize? Digitize it all—it takes more resources to prioritize than to just get it all digitized.

Context matters. Within the context of IU Bloomington’s media preservation work we see the following answers to the question of why prioritize:

Lots of stuff
Our campus owns more than 560,000 audio, video, and film objects. At that scale, we are not convinced that it takes more resources to prioritize, particularly if prioritization is completed at the collection level and digitization is done at the object level using preservation principles.

No guarantees
Economic slowdowns and recessions happen and result in cutbacks or loss of funds. We are working for stable funding but, even if successful, there may be no guarantees over the course of 15 years or more. Better to get what you really want preserved digitized now.

Some recordings are falling apart
Most media formats are actively degrading, some catastrophically. In a short period of time we will lose the opportunity to digitize some items with full fidelity or at all.

Some machines are falling apart
Obsolescence is hitting media formats hard. It is increasingly difficult and expensive to find playback machines, spare parts, repair expertise, and even playback expertise. On an international level, there is talk that there are no longer enough playback machines with enough head life to digitize existing holdings of some formats. This is only going to get worse.

Administrative view
Our administration wants us to prioritize, to engage in a process where we decide what is most important and make choices. But there is also the added value that this process of selection for preservation will encourage an appraisal (a closely related archival function) mindset, which leads to more focused collection development going forward. Another way to put it: acquiring new collections with criteria for long-term preservation in mind from the beginning.

Workflows
Some parts of prioritization can be completed by skilled, supervised graduate students whereas preservation transfer (digitization) in our context usually requires more highly paid engineers.

Value
We hate to admit it, but some of our stuff may simply not be worth preserving. For example, large collections of common, commercial, and circulating VHS tapes and DVDs are valuable for student entertainment but perhaps not for long-term preservation. And, every unit holds collections that they consider to be the cream of the crop. These items deserve to be preserved first with others of lesser value going second as resources permit.

IU Bloomington is embarking upon a campus-wide media prioritization process beginning spring semester 2012. See the next post for an overview of our proposed process.

// Mike Casey

The recommendation is wide ranging and significant considering its source and strong language. I won’t attempt to represent its entirety, but a few specific points have sparked the following thoughts relating to our work that may be of interest to campus stakeholders.

High-level Support

The fact that this recommendation was issued by the executive body of the European Union and that it urges intensified effort demonstrates an understanding of the immensity of this undertaking. Action at the highest levels is necessary for successful and timely large-scale preservation of cultural heritage. And, there is money behind it —European Union Structural Funds are available to co-fund digitization activities as part of projects that stimulate regional economies and the recommendation calls for even more widespread and systematic use of this support.

At IU Bloomington, the Media Preservation Initiative (MPI) was born out of a realization that digital preservation of audio, video, and film holdings was beyond the reach of any individual campus unit. We calculated that it would take our two largest media-holding units roughly 120 years and 58 years respectively to digitally preserve their holdings. Other units had few prospects for even engaging in preservation work. With this in mind we began developing a campus-wide solution. It is clear that digital preservation must become part of the infrastructure of our institution.

Timeline

Both the recommendation and the strategic plan for Europeana advocate digitizing Europe’s entire cultural heritage by 2025.

We believe that a 15-20 year window of opportunity exists to digitally preserve audio and video recordings before the combination of degradation and obsolescence makes it either impossible or prohibitively expensive, particularly for large collections. Our strategic plan is built around preserving campus targets within a 15 year period from 2013-2027.

Purpose

The recommendation touts “enormous economic opportunities,” “further development of Europe’s cultural and creative capacities,” and “the quality of life of European citizens” as benefits of “digitizing and providing wider access to cultural resources.”

For our campus, we might add the research, instructional, and experiential value of the many thousands of unique and rare recordings and films of classical music, world music, film history, endangered languages, radio history, Indiana culture, University proceedings, the creative output of artists, and much more held by IU Bloomington.

Access

The recommendation foregrounds access by setting a goal of 30 million digitized objects in Europeana—the online digital library for Europe—by 2015.

Although preservation has been the primary focus of the MPI thus far, we recognize that there is little basis for preservation without access. One of our major objectives this year is to develop media access recommendations for the campus. We have formed an access task force that is already addressing issues relating to copyright and intellectual property, rights management, discovery, infrastructure, metadata and others.

Collaboration

The pooling of digitization efforts and sharing of equipment, cross-border collaboration, and development of partnerships between cultural institutions and the private sector are all encouraged in the European Commission recommendation. They have obviously concluded that meeting this challenge requires strong collaborations.

For IU, collaboration begins with the 80+ media-holding units on the Bloomington campus as well as the five administrative units that have jointly funded MPI development and planning. We must also prioritize communication with other institutions engaged in similar work along with organizations developing standards and best practices if we are to be successful. In addition, the MPI is in the early stages of exploring what form partnerships with other universities might take.

The window is open and the time is now!

// Mike Casey

Click the picture below to access Europeana’s site:

]]> http://mediapreservation.wordpress.com/2011/11/17/emphasizing-digital-preservation-and-access/feed/ 0 TextBox mediapreservation TextBox logo_English_Apples_landscape http://mediapreservation.wordpress.com/2011/11/15/educational-film/ http://mediapreservation.wordpress.com/2011/11/15/educational-film/#comments Tue, 15 Nov 2011 18:50:36 +0000 mediapreservation http://mediapreservation.wordpress.com/?p=200 Continue reading »]]> The largest component of the Indiana University Libraries Film Archive is the educational collection which consists of approximately 48,000 films and 7,000 videos. Educational films have recently emerged as a major focus for researchers from a number of disciplines who are exploring the historical and sociopolitical implications of the films that brought the world into classrooms for more than 50 years.

The films date from 1911 to the 1980s. Historically one of the largest university film libraries in the country, the collection began acquiring 16mm silent films in 1931 and 16mm sound films in 1935. IU Bloomington began its own film production in the mid-1940s and had produced 65 educational titles by 1954, often using scores composed by faculty. By this time, the university was home to a formal Audio-Visual Center (AVC) under the directorship L.C. Larson with a 130-person staff.

The circulating film library had reportedly grown to over 100,000 reels by 1953 and earned a national reputation as one of the biggest and best of its kind. They were distributed by rental to educational facilities across the U.S by the AVC which was also the distributor for NET (National Educational Television, the predecessor to PBS).

The collection includes international news, historical reenactment, cultural heritage, social adjustment, hygiene, music, and career training films from the 1940s-60s; Stephen Spielberg’s first film Amblin (1968); and Johnny Cash, June Carter Cash, and Jack Palance in programming that explores the Trail of Tears. Additionally, there are many WWII propaganda films produced by the Department of War (now, Department of Defense) including Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire which encouraged citizens to keep leftover meat fat so that it could be recycled into ammunition.

The films and their accompanying guides are rich in material relevant to the study of gender, globalization, environmentalism, regionalism, and race, offering important information about how these topics were visualized and taught in different contexts over different historical periods.

Over half of the films and videos in this collection are available for searching in the university’s catalog and many are becoming available as streaming media on the film archive’s streaming page. From there you can view “Indiana University Goes to War” or experience what it might have been like to send your daughter to attend IU in the mid-century.

// Mike Lee, Rachael Stoeltje, and Mike Casey

]]> http://mediapreservation.wordpress.com/2011/11/15/educational-film/feed/ 0 20111006_ALFFilmTransfer_WEB__017 mediapreservation Indiana University Educational Film Collection Indiana University Educational Film Collection IU Film Archive http://mediapreservation.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/a-step-forward/ http://mediapreservation.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/a-step-forward/#comments Thu, 20 Oct 2011 19:49:11 +0000 mediapreservation http://mediapreservation.wordpress.com/?p=40 Continue reading »]]> It is a tremendous step forward in everything: story, development of plot, acting, conception, all the way down the line.

–Herb Caen, columnist, San Francisco Chronicle

The above quote comes from a 1941 recording made in the lobby of San Francisco’s Gary Theater after the northern California premiere of Orson Welles’ landmark film Citizen Kane. The recording, made by radio station KSFO, contains short interviews with Caen, Dorothy Comingore who appears in the film, Claude La Belle of the San Francisco News, and Welles himself. It is one of 253 lacquer discs in the Welles Collection at the Lilly Library, the first recordings we are digitally preserving with the Indiana Media Preservation and Access Center (IMPAC) start-up project. This is the first disc we digitized. It is our starting place—for us, a significant step forward.

These lacquer discs originated as the Mercury Theatre on the Air’s working audio archives. After Welles relocated from the United States to Europe in late 1947, his colleague Richard Wilson took possession of the materials left behind in the group’s office, including the sound recordings. These materials were purchased in 1979 by the Lilly Library where they now comprise part of a larger collection titled the Welles mss.

The audio portion of this collection contains master, original recordings of numerous episodes of such canonical Welles series as Ceiling Unlimited, Hello Americans, This Is My Best, and various incarnations of the Orson Welles Almanac, including a prospective eight-part series for the Eversharp Pen Company that was never broadcast. Other highlights include an irreverent spoof of Macbeth recorded privately during a rehearsal in April 1940; a broadcast made shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, during which Welles was interrupted by a government blackout notice; and the most complete known set of The Doorway to Life, a Peabody Award winning program by Mercury Theatre member William Alland. Collectively, these discs constitute a unique audio record of the seminal broadcast work of Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre associates during and immediately after the Second World War.

The Welles lacquers have serious preservation problems. The format itself is inherently unstable, subject to catastrophic degradation processes that can leave a disc with a lacquer coating that is delaminating (cracking and peeling), resulting in loss of the recorded signal. Forty-three percent of the Welles discs exhibit the characteristic white, oily sheen known as plasticizer exudation, which is considered a precursor to delamination. The lacquer coating is attached to a glass base on 31% of the discs and at least 26 of these items are already cracked or broken. Glass was used due to a shortage of aluminum during the war years.

We chose the Welles lacquers as our first collection because they are actively degrading, at very high risk for loss of content, and highly valuable for research, instruction, and entertainment. Other campus collections will follow. This is the first of many steps forward.

// Mike Casey and Patrick Feaster

]]> http://mediapreservation.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/a-step-forward/feed/ 0 OrsonPhoto mediapreservation OrsonPhoto Orson Welles Lacquer Disc Project at Indiana University http://mediapreservation.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/providing-media-preservation-services/ http://mediapreservation.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/providing-media-preservation-services/#comments Thu, 20 Oct 2011 19:47:50 +0000 mediapreservation http://mediapreservation.wordpress.com/?p=152 Continue reading »]]> The cornerstone recommendation from the Task Force report Meeting the Challenge of Media Preservation: Strategies and Solutions is to establish the Indiana Media Preservation and Access Center (IMPAC) on the Bloomington campus. IMPAC will provide the preservation and access digitization services necessary to attain campus targets which include the preservation of 284,000 audio recordings and 66,000 video recordings along with access digitization of 58,000 films, all within 15 years. Current digital media preservation efforts on campus are limited and will not keep pace with degradation and obsolescence. The IMPAC is a solution for media-holding units that will enable long-term preservation and access to irreplaceable content.

IMPAC will be a service provider, offering media preservation and access services to IU Bloomington units, including:

• preservation transfer (digitization) of analog audio recordings
• preservation transfer of analog video recordings
• preservation transfer of physical digital (CD, MiniDv, DVD, for example) audio and video recordings
• access transfer of motion picture film
• photographs of preserved objects and their containers
• digitization work to fulfill orders from researchers for campus media holdings
• creation of derivative digital files for researcher access
• collection of technical and digital provenance metadata on the preserved object, resulting digital files, and the preservation process
• preparation of media holdings for digitization
• assistance with prioritization of media holdings for preservation treatment

IMPAC will collaborate with the IU Libraries’ Digital Library Program and UITS’ Scholarly Data Archive to ensure the long-term preservation of preserved media content within a trusted digital repository setting. IMPAC will also collaborate with these units and other campus stakeholders to facilitate access to preserved media content.

IMPAC services will be provided by a skilled team of audio engineers, video engineers, film specialists, metadata specialists, quality control personnel, administrators, and graduate and undergraduate students.

// Mike Casey

Here is a visualization of IMPAC functions and physical spaces, based on a quick sketch made by an architect attending a preliminary requirements meeting earlier this year. Click to view and magnify in your browser.

SMART work will focus on gaining basic physical and intellectual control over media holdings including tasks such as assigning unique numbers, adding barcodes, gathering basic descriptive and technical identifying information, and locating copies and accompanying documentation if they exist. This work will utilize existing metadata (such as shelf or call numbers) when available. Eventually, this team will also help with packing and transporting recordings to the preservation center as needed. We anticipate that units will vary in the amount and type of assistance they require from the SMART team.

Survey Work at the ATM

First task for the team is to measure and count the holdings of the Archives of Traditional Music and Archives of African American Music and Culture for possible future transfer to the IU Libraries’ Auxiliary Library Facility (ALF). ALF provides a consistent 50°F and 30% relative humidity environment which will significantly extend the lifespan of magnetic tape materials. We are exploring the possibility of storing the audio and video holdings of a number of campus units in ALF—most of the motion picture film on campus is already there.

Shelves Ready for Storage at the ALF