Workshop Materials

Workshop Slides

Recording | Audio en español

Description:

This workshop on Disaster Planning for Digital Repositories delves deeply into the essentials of risk assessment and disaster planning for digital collections. Facilitated by Rebecca Frank, a researcher with expertise in risk and disaster planning for digital preservation, this session is specifically designed to arm information professionals with knowledge and practical tools needed for conducting effective risk assessments and crafting robust disaster plans. By focusing on the strategies for identifying risks and practical approaches for developing disaster plans, the workshop addresses the urgent need for preparedness in the face of uncertainty.

The workshop is structured to explore approaches for risk assessment and disaster planning via presentation, discussion, and hands-on activities. The workshop will begin with an interactive presentation and discussion about risk assessment strategies and approaches to disaster planning. After establishing a foundation and shared understanding around these topics, the workshop will transition into hands-on activities. Participants will be guided through practical exercises designed to introduce risk assessment processes and outline disaster plan content. These activities aim to cement the concepts discussed and provide attendees with actionable skills and strategies.

Emphasizing the critical importance of identifying and understanding threats and risks to digital collections, the workshop underscores a strategy for disaster preparedness that focuses on response and recovery. Attendees will leave with a heightened awareness of the vulnerabilities inherent in digital repositories and a clear set of practices for mitigating these risks. This workshop is not just an educational opportunity but a call to action for information professionals to prioritize the preservation and resilience of digital repositories.

Instructor bio:

Rebecca D. Frank, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK). She is also affiliated with the Einstein Center Digital Future in Berlin, Germany. Prior to joining the faculty at UTK, she was the Einstein Center Digital Future Junior Professor for Information Management at the Berlin School of Library and Information Science at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her research examines the social construction of risk in trustworthy digital repository audit and certification. She also conducts research in the areas of open data, digital preservation, digital curation, and data reuse, focusing on the social and ethical barriers that limit or prevent efforts to curate, preserve, and/or make data open. She has a PhD and an MSI from the University of Michigan School of Information, and a BA in Organizational Studies from the University of Michigan. Her work has been supported by the Deutsche Stiftung Friedensforschung (German Foundation for Peace Research), the Einstein Centre Digital Future, the InfraLab Berlin, the National Science Foundation (United States), and the Australian Academy of Science.

Workshop Materials

Day 1 Recording

Day 2 Recording | Audio en español Dia 2

Description

What do you do if you get data off old floppies, CD-ROMs, or hard drives, but still can’t access the files because they depend on decades-old software? What if the files lose data or don’t look right when converted or opened in a modern format? Emulation can help by recreating the whole computing environment your data was originally intended for. But it also requires a familiarity with software and computing systems that takes significant time and is often outside the bounds of traditional archiving and cultural heritage work.

In this two-day workshop, participants and instructors will take a step back from our day-to-day work and consider the question: What is a computer? Using this question as an anchor, participants will gain conceptual and practical experience with the concerns of incorporating software preservation and emulation into digital preservation workflows.

On day one, participants will gain perspective on the landscape of software and software-dependent collections and build basic familiarity with components of computers and virtual machines. On day two, we’ll work directly with emulation and digital preservation tools, and take time at the end of the day to reflect on the role of emulation as a preservation and access strategy within a cultural heritage context.

Learning objectives:

• Become familiar with software and software-based collections, both conceptually and via use case examples
• Develop a framework for thinking through persistent and emerging preservation and access questions for complex, born-digital collections
• Learn foundational components and structure of computing hardware and virtual machines (VMs)
• Break through apprehension to use emulators: with some guidance in exploration and decision-making, all of us are capable of leveraging these tools
• Learn why collaboration is essential for this work, and identify opportunities and communities to practice your new skills

Instructor bios:

Ethan Gates (he/him) is a Software Preservation Analyst for Yale University Library and leads user support and documentation for the grant-funded EaaSI (Emulation-as-a-Service Infrastructure) program of work. He contributed the entry for “Emulation” in The Handbook of Archival Practice (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021) and has served professionally for the Association of Moving Image Archivists, the BitCurator Consortium, and the Software Preservation Network.

Claire Fox (she/her) is a Digital Preservation Librarian at Yale University Library. At Yale, she works to build awareness, strategy, and workflows for the long-term preservation and access of Yale’s software and software-dependent collections. She is also a member of the Software Preservation Network, where she serves as treasurer for the Coordinating Committee and as a co-coordinator for the Metadata Working Group. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Workshop Materials

Recordings

Audio en español

Description

What is the value of “oral history metadata assessment?” In this hands-on, interactive workshop, you’ll be introduced to that question and the Oral History Association Metadata Task Force’s assessment toolkit for capturing, preserving, and sharing information about interviews and collections across the oral history lifecycle. The toolkit is designed to facilitate thoughtful decision-making about metadata regardless of system, schema, or software platform. 

Following a presentation of foundational information about oral history descriptive practices, the MTF instructors will facilitate small-group exercises designed around using the toolkit. The toolkit involves processes and steps meant to help both new projects set up quickly with descriptive rigor, and offer long standing projects a fresh but structured way to address missing pieces of their metadata puzzles. This methodology – shaped by a nationwide survey of oral history practices the MTF conducted in 2016-2019 – emphasizes how different projects and teams require different metadata decisions, and those decisions are based on a particular set of resources, goals, and limitations. The assessment process that participants will be guided through will also include an exercise to consider how to map system-agnostic metadata selections to existing standards in their home metadata ecosystems. Built into the four-hour workshop are small group discussions as well as a concluding Q&A session where participants will have opportunities to ask specific questions, share experiences, and talk through issues related to describing oral histories. 

Our aim is to offer a “train the trainer” style session on assessing the universal utility of these metadata elements as critical to creating, preserving, and making oral histories accessible to researchers, regardless of system or software platform. This workshop offers a holistic way of thinking about metadata that moves away from technical lingo and toward a shared understanding of what is useful to know about oral histories: no technical expertise is required for participation! It will be an excellent opportunity for peer learning and discovering contrasts and similarities in oral history practices across contexts.

Learning Goals:

Workshop participants will learn how to apply an assessment toolkit to their oral history projects and collections, and lead members of their team of stakeholders through the assessment process. 

Upon completion of this workshop, you will be able to:

• Articulate the needs and characteristics of your institution or practice
• Decide which metadata elements to capture, preserve, and share to meet those needs
• Identify current and future locations to store metadata elements
• Consider practical and ethical aspects of metadata capture throughout the lifecycle
• Use this toolkit at your own institution and with your own colleagues

More info on the Oral History Metadata Taskforce (OHAMTF)

Workshop Materials

Workshop Recording for Day 1 | Audio en español

Worksop Recording for Day 2 | Audio en español

Description

This workshop will provide an overview of planning and managing large-scale digitization projects through their entire lifecycle, including selection and preparation of materials, metadata creation, digitization, quality control, digital asset management and preservation, providing access, promotion, and assessment. The workshop will focus on archival collections of text and images but the strategies shared could also be applied to audiovisual materials or other formats.

Learning objectives:

• Learn how to plan successful large-scale digitization projects
• Learn about best practices, guidelines, and other published resources related to large-scale digitization
• Understand how to adjust general strategies to accommodate local resources, materials, and project goals
• Become familiar with tools, equipment, and software for executing and managing projects

Instructor bio

Emily Lapworth (she/her) is Digital Special Collections and Archives Librarian at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her work focuses on increasing online access to archival materials, and managing workflows and projects related to digitization, metadata creation, digital asset management, and digital preservation. Her research interests include improving the user experience of digital collections and she has published several articles on large-scale digitization. Emily holds an MLIS from Simmons University and a BA from Brandeis University.

Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras

Descripción del taller:

Los materiales magnéticos están en inminente riesgo. Para fines de la siguiente década habremos perdido muchísimo contenido almacenado en estos formatos. La digitalización es la única herramienta disponible para asegurar que valiosos contenidos se perpetúen en el tiempo. Sin embargo, la digitalización es un proceso que requiere de recursos tecnológicos y humanos que hacen necesaria la planificación previa para recolectar la información necesaria sobre dichos objetos.  Esto permite optimizar recursos y definir estrategias para la protección de los contenidos una vez creadas las copias digitales.

En los tres días del taller los participantes aprenderán a identificar formatos, a documentar información básica sobre ellos y a utilizar dicha información para tomar decisiones con respecto a su preservación. También revisaremos sistemas de digitalización y los distintos componentes necesarios utilizando unl kit de digitalización portátil. Previo al taller se compartirá material de estudio de preparación que los participantes deberán revisar antes del inicio de las sesiones. Se realizará además una actividad de seguimiento con los participantes después del taller para contestar preguntas sobre los proyectos de planificación iniciados durante el taller.

Los contenidos del taller se compartirán aquí.

Objetivos:

Familiarizarse con los distintos formatos de video análogo y sus riesgos más comunes con el objetivo de entender y aplicar metodologías de administración de colecciones audiovisuales y la planificación para la digitalización y preservación de dichos contenidos. El objetivo final del curso es dar inicio a un plan de preservación que considere: identificación, inventario, aspectos básicos de conservación, selección, priorización y planificación de digitalización.

Biografía de la instructora:

Pamela Vízner es archivista audiovisual chilena con experiencia internacional en preservación digital, de películas, video y sonido, especializada en administración de colecciones y flujos de trabajo para digitalización. Actualmente se desempeña como Consultora Senior en la compañía AVP donde lidera proyectos de implementación de sistemas de gestión de objetos digitales a gran escala. Pamela comenzó su carrera con archivos de sonido y posteriormente, se interesó en las colecciones de imágenes en movimiento. Es licenciada en Ciencias de la Música y el Sonido de la Universidad de Chile y tiene una maestría en Preservación y Archivo de Imágenes en Movimiento de la Universidad de Nueva York en donde se desempeñó como profesora adjunta. Pamela tiene vasta experiencia en el área de la educación como tallerista y presentadora de múltiples programas internacionales, además de enseñar el curso de digitalización de video de la Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (EQZE) en el país vasco. Pamela ha participado en el Programa de Preservación Audiovisual (APEX) de la Universidad de Nueva York desde 2013 como organizadora y mentora, programa que se llevó a cabo en San Juan y Vieques en 2019. Es también miembro de la Red Iberoamericana de Preservación de Archivos Sonoros y Audiovisuales (RIPDASA) y como miembro activa de la comunidad internacional de archivistas siempre busca formas de integrar un diálogo plural para la colaboración mutua.

Workshop Materials

Workshop Recording

Audio en español

Este evento contará con la interpretación simultánea de inglés al español

Workshop description:
This workshop will provide a practical introduction to the assessment of analog audiovisual material in archives, with a focus on the kinds of knowledge one can glean from looking closely at archival media objects, and how to use that knowledge to prioritize archival AV material for preservation. 

Geared towards archival workers who encounter analog media in collections in their day to day work, the workshop will consist of illustrated lectures on these obsolete media technologies designed to help participants understand their holdings and make decisions about them. Participants will have a chance to apply course concepts with virtual media triage activities based on digital images. The final section of the workshop will consider prioritization for preservation, and will introduce some tools and methods currently in use for collecting data about AV media to support preservation.

By the end of the workshop, participants should understand what can be learned about AV media from a visual assessment, how to use that knowledge to document collection materials, and how to find and use data collection tools tools designed to support AV assessment for preservation.  

Learning objectives:

• Understand the range of formats and content types of AV and what to look for to identify them
• Understand categories and characteristics of analog audiovisual media that contribute to its quality, type of content, and preservation risk.
• Learn some of the terminology associated with obsolete media technologies
• Become familiar with some tools designed to document and manage archival AV media

This workshop will be recorded and available after the live event.

Instructor bio:
Megan McShea (she/her) is an independent archivist based in Baltimore, MD. Current projects focus on archival processing, metadata, photo and video digitization, digital asset management, digital preservation, and workflow development. She has taught workshops on archival processing, archival description, and working with audiovisual materials through SAA, AMIA, and the Community Archives Program at the University of Baltimore. Prior to working independently, she was the first Audiovisual Archivist at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, where she developed practices in a manuscript repository setting around audiovisual collection management, processing, digitization, and preservation. She holds an MLS from the University of Maryland, College Park and a BA in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University.

Workshop Slides

Este evento contará con la interpretación simultánea de inglés al español

Workshop description:
Climate change poses enormous challenges to archives and archivists. In the short term, climate change presents issues such as unpredictable weather and the potential for more frequent and severe disasters. In the long-term, climate change may reshape decisions around the geographic location, appraisal, and use of archives. In this workshop, archivists and cultural heritage professionals, regardless of their location, will learn about how climate change impacts our work and cultural heritage institutions.

Instructor bio:
Eira Tansey is an archivist, researcher, and consultant based in Cincinnati/the Ohio River watershed. Her active areas of research include the effects of climate change on archives and archivists, the role of records within environmental regulation, and the enforcement of recordkeeping laws. Her research has been profiled in Nature, VICE, Pacific Standard, and Yale Climate Connections. She has written for a wide variety of archives, history, and environmental policy journals, and is currently working on a publication for CLIR titled A Green New Deal for Archives.

This workshop will not be recorded, but slides will be made available.

Suggested Pre-readings:

Tansey, Eira. “Archival adaptation to climate change.” Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy 11, no. 2 (2015): 45-56. https://doi.org/10.1080/15487733.2015.11908146

Goldman, Benjamin Matthew. “It’s Not Easy Being Green (e): Digital Preservation in the Age of Climate Change.” (2018). https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/resources/381e68bf-c199-4786-ae61-671aede4e041

Pendergrass, Keith L., Walker Sampson, Tim Walsh, and Laura Alagna. “Toward environmentally sustainable digital preservation.” The American Archivist 82, no. 1 (2019): 165-206. https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081-82.1.165

Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras

Fecha para inscribirse: La convocatoria se encuentra cerrada

Los talleres de entrenamiento tendrán una modalidad de estudio presencial. La inscripción no tiene costo, sin embargo, los gastos de viaje son responsabilidad de los participantes. Ofrecemos almuerzo y una merienda cada día del taller. Como parte de sus iniciativas, la DPOE-N acepta solicitudes para becas que podrán cubrir los gastos de participación individual (viaje, dieta, etc.) de modo que se garantice la participación de profesionales e interesados fuera del área metropolitana. La inscripción es limitada y aceptan solicitudes hasta 23 de diciembre. Los resultados de la convocatoria se darán a conocer a partir del 15 de enero 2023.

Biografía del Recurso:
El profesor Joel Blanco obtuvo su grado doctoral en la Escuela de Ciencias de la Información de la Universidad de Pittsburgh. En la actualidad es profesor adjunto de la Escuela Nacional de Conservación, Restauración y Museografía Manuel Castillo Negrete (ENCRyM). Ha enseñado cursos en temas relacionados al manejo de archivos y colecciones. Trabaja temas relacionados al cruce interdisciplinario de la memoria, la historia y la archivística.

Justificación:
Este taller pretende definir los estándares básicos de la preservación digital con el fin de desarrollar un diálogo entre los participantes. De esta conversación, se espera redefinir, calibrar y cuestionar estos fundamentos para lograr un plan de preservación digital accesible para organizaciones con limitados recursos fiscales y humanos. La meta es promover modelos atemperados a la realidad de Puerto Rico tomando en cuenta los retos y desafíos económicos, políticos y climatológicos.

Objetivos:
Comprender los conceptos y prácticas fundamentales de la preservación digital.
Identificar estrategias o acciones de preservación digital para aplicar a partir de las necesidades y realidades de organizaciones culturales que custodian acervos documentales.

Desarrollar un plan de preservación digital accesible a diversas organizaciones culturales que custodian acervos documentales.

Se creará un Google Site que sirva de centro de recursos de apoyo para que los participantes puedan hacer consultas luego del taller. Se planifica una sesión grupal de presentaciones de los planes de preservación digital de todos los participantes.

Actividad Postaller
Habrá una sesión grupal

Workshop Slides

Introduction

Captions, subtitles, and transcripts deliver a host of benefits for archival audiovisual media, providing access for users who need (or enjoy) them while also enhancing curatorial work through computational analysis. In this 3-hour webinar, participants will learn about creating, editing, preserving, and using timed text, highlighting the variety of approaches to the ethical, technical, and budgetary challenges inherent to this work.

This webinar is aimed at any LAM staff who work with digital audiovisual media, no special software or computing resources are necessary.

Instructors:

Brendan Coates (he/him/his) is a gardener, musician, and member of the Los Angeles Tenants Union. He has been working to ensure the long-term stability and relevance of archival audiovisual materials since 2011, with a particular focus on oral histories, for which he’s contributed to programs at The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, The History Makers, and, currently, at the Computer History Museum. He’s a graduate of the University of Michigan’s School of Information (#HailToTheVictims) and a winner of the Independent Games Festival Nuovo Award with Cassie McQuater for his contribution to her web game Black Room.

Dinah Handel (she/her/hers) is the Digitization Services Manager at Stanford University, where she works across their digital library program to provide quality services to Stanford University patrons and the community at large. Previously, she was the Mass Digitization Coordinator at the New York Public Library, and an NDSR‐NY resident at CUNY TV. She holds an MLIS from Pratt Institute in New York, and a BA from Hampshire College

Workshop Materials:

Day One Slides

Day Two Slides

RPG Instructions

Introduction:

As cultural heritage practitioners, we perform a variety of tasks to document, manage, and preserve cultural heritage materials. Some of these tasks necessitate hands-on piecemeal work with physical and digital collections materials, whereas others may be managed by an ecosystem of software tools, such as databases, project management software, and collection management and digital preservation systems. One frame of reference we can use to characterize the latter is operations and systems management. In this workshop, participants will learn how to identify opportunities to operationalize cultural heritage work, tools that can support operations and systems management, and how to engage in thoughtful action and collaboration with colleagues to meet institutional needs.

Workshop structure:

Day One (2 hours)

We will start by defining what operations and systems management is, especially in terms of how it has been historically applied within and throughout the manufacturing and service industries. With this definition in mind, we will turn our eye to the cultural heritage sector, and ask, what does operations and systems management look like in terms of archival and digital preservation work? We will provide concrete examples here of tools, methodologies and approaches we have taken in our own work at two major collecting institutions.

After a break, we will pose a question: is there a way to perform operations management in a way that centers and honors the worker, the creator whose works the institution is stewarding, and our communities at-large? We will also provide concrete examples here of what certain institutions (or individuals/teams at institutions) are doing in the field to accomplish this.

Day Two (2 hours)

Day 2 will be an interactive, skill-building opportunity for new professionals to gain experience planning, implementing, and maintaining systems in archives. Over the course of the workshop, participants will be guided through playing a role-playing game (RPG) in which they are tasked with implementing a brand-new system or initiative. Through the rolling of di, participants will build up their character’s characteristics, and be led on a journey by workshop facilitators where they will encounter certain challenges and opportunities. They must use what they have learned on Day 1 (or invent new strategies) to navigate through to the end of a fictional project. The day will end with a facilitated discussion about each participant’s experiences, and what they may have learned along the way.

Learning Outcomes: 

• Participants will learn how to articulate problems/challenges relating to digital preservation operations and map a user’s journey re: cultural heritage systems/technology
• Participants will learn how to write communication plans, system requirements, and implementation plans
• Participants will gain a better understanding of the shadow administrative infrastructures that underlie processing and descriptive work
• Participants will be:
  • introduced to systems that support operations, broadly, such as databases, spreadsheets, and common applications/software
  • Introduced to systems “ecosystems” (clusters/chains of solutions)
  • Understand what skills may be required to support, advocate for, and maintain systems
  • Recognize red flags that may make certain efforts or projects hard to implement or maintain

Instructors:

Dinah Handel is the Digitization Service Manager at Stanford Libraries, where she supports digitization services and digital access to collections. Previously, she was the Mass Digitization Coordinator at the New York Public Library and was a NDSR-NY resident at CUNY TV. She holds an MLIS from Pratt Institute in New York, and a BA from Hampshire College.

Mary Kidd currently works as the Systems and Operations Manager in the Preservation Department at the New York Public Library. She leads a team developing systems-based tools to streamline special collections operations and reporting. Previously, she worked as Project Lead for the Andrew W. Mellon-funded project Preserve This Podcast, and was a National Digital Stewardship Resident at the New York Public Radio Archives. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Description:

As cultural production and communication have moved online, the need for archivists to document history in real time has become increasingly clear and urgent. Yet the scale and complexity of online information and media can be daunting, even as web archiving tools and practices continue to evolve. And while large institutions are able to devote staff to keeping pace with new technologies and their attendant ethical concerns, small-to-mid sized organizations frequently rely on archivists who already handle many other responsibilities for this work. How does one design a web archiving program that meets the demands of our time with the resources at hand?

This two-day workshop is designed to provide an introduction to web archiving fundamentals and tools for archivists seeking to initiate web archiving programs within their organizations and communities that are grounded in ethical practices and scaled to their resources. Attendees will learn about current projects and advances in the field, and receive practical guidance on drafting collecting policies based on institutional mission and capacity, as well as hands-on instruction using open source tools. Participants should come away with a firm grounding in the principles and tools needed to sustainably advocate, plan for, and implement web archiving in their institutions. No previous experience in web archiving is required.

Resource list: Sustainable Web Archiving at Scale

Day 1 Slides: Sustainable Web Archiving at Scale

Day 2 Slides: Sustainable Web Archiving at Scale

Web Archiving Glossary: Sustainable Web Archiving at Scale

Web Archiving Tools Decision Chart: Sustainable Web Archiving at Scale

Worksheet: Sustainable Web Archiving at Scale

Description:

Moving image and sound materials were challenging to steward in the analog era, and now with the turn to digital preservation, an entirely new set of challenges are presented for collection managers. While there is clear overlap between digital preservation of static material and time-based media, many unique factors are involved in the latter, including characteristics such as multiple codecs within a container, multi-track audio recordings, obscure analog video formats, handling large files, and so on. The workshop will provide an overview of factors like these, alongside exercises to assist in working with moving image and sound material in digital preservation activities.

This two-day workshop is designed to provide an introduction to digital preservation with a focus on the moving image and sound asset lifecycle. Alongside digital preservation fundamentals, attendees will learn about current advances in the field, format identification, what audiovisual materials to prioritize for transfer, readying materials for digitization, quality assurance and metadata for the purpose of digital preservation. An introduction to a selection of software tools, and some hands-on work will be incorporated. Participants will come away with practical skills and methods for crafting and implementing a digital preservation workflow for audiovisual materials in their collections, and a basic knowledge of the purpose and application of technical metadata. Time will be reserved for participants to sign up for one-on-one office hours so that individualized questions may be addressed by the instructor.

Slides: Introduction to Digital Preservation for Moving Image and Sound (PDF)
Reading List: Introduction to Digital Preservation for Moving Image and Sound (PDF)

Instructor Bio

Lauren Sorensen (she/her) works as Digital Projects & Data Manager for Stanford University Libraries and previously has held positions with organizations such as Bay Area Video Coalition, Library of Congress, Canyon Cinema, and as consultant has worked with the City of Los Angeles, Glenstone Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. She has previously served on the Association of Moving Image Archivists’ Board of Directors, is currently on the editorial board for The Moving Image Journal, and is a contributing author to Archival Accessioning (2021, Society of American Archivists).

Description:

Much of the day-to-day work in digital preservation is in the technical realm: moving files, checking for file integrity, understanding and implementing processes for ingest and so on. While some archivists can closely collaborate with computer programmers and IT departments, many institutions do not have the resources and will need to build technical skills on their own. Even when an IT department exists, not all needs of digital-based archival work can be fulfilled in a timely manner, thus having an archivist or digital archivist who can empower themselves with handy scripts and practical experience in the command line becomes essential.

This workshop is designed to be an intensive two-days of demonstrations and practical exercises, starting with the command line interface, tools demonstration, and working up to, on day two, an introduction to Python scripting.

Day one:

Instructor: Brendan Coates

Slides: Day 1

Resources: Day 1

List of commands: Day 1

Learning objectives include an introductory level of familiarity with the command line interface, where many digital preservation applications are run from. The participants will come away with an understanding of Homebrew (Mac) and Winget (Windows), how to navigate a file system using basic commands including listing files in a directory, creating a new directory, permissions issues, and where files are located. The second half of the first day will then be devoted to tool demonstrations and exercises, covering av-specific tools, such as FFmpeg and Mediainfo, as well as utilities like rsync, which allow the user to automatically copy files from one place to another, and Bagit, which is used regularly in many digital preservation repositories and environments.

Day two: 

Instructors: Benjamin H. Turkus and Nick Krabbenhoeft

Lesson website: Day 2

ffmprovisr resource: Day 2

The second day will be focused on learning what scripts can do to help facilitate the work of a digital preservation practitioner. What is a programming language and what is its utility for everyday work, and what makes Python particularly useful? The basic concepts will be covered, and then move on to utilizing some example scripts in scenarios like, generating file manifests from folders of files, generating custom technical metadata reports with MediaInfo, and transcoding videos.

Description:

As digital preservation and curation practices reach operational maturity among cultural heritage institutions, discussion about anti-racism and digital preservation seems to be at its nascent stages. From the systems archivists use to capture content for long-term care, to the ways we provide access to born-digital materials, digital preservation practices when left unchecked can replicate the same harms witnessed in the physical realm. What are some practical ways archivists can apply anti-racist frameworks to digital preservation activities and approaches? 

This three-hour workshop is designed to provide an understanding of how white supremacy underpins library and archive systems and practices and offers an introduction to anti-racist frameworks as groundwork for better practices in digital preservation. Attendees will learn about current projects, related literature, and case studies in the field.

This workshop is ideal for all who acquire, maintain, or provide access to born-digital and digitized archival materials. 

Instructor Bios

Sofia Leung (she/her) is a first-generation Chinese American librarian, facilitator, and educator and the principal of Do Better, Be Better LLC. Her work attempts to center the experiences and knowledges of Black, Indigenous and People of Color. Sofia is a founding editor at up//root: a we here publication and the co-editor of Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies Through Critical Race Theory (2021). You can find out more about Sofia at her website: https://www.sofiayleung.com/.

Elvia Arroyo-Ramírez (she/her) is a queer Latinx daughter of immigrants working in the field of archives. She is the co-editor to an upcoming special issue on “Radical Empathy in Archival Practice” in the Journal for Critical Library and Information Science (JCLIS). Her practice and scholarship are grounded in a feminist ethic of care, and works to expose and repair archival practices rooted in systemic biases that perpetuate harm to BIPOC and other marginalized communities. 

Description:

With the ever-increasing scale and complexity of digital archival collections, archivists need to adapt their tools, workflows, and processes to match. While every institutional context is different, there are often opportunities to employ open source and command line tools to meet these challenges. Among the many benefits of utilizing the command line, the two most immediate tend to be: increased reliability of processes and more interesting work for archivists.

This 4-hour workshop will cover the basics of the command line interface (CLI) with a focus on its use in audiovisual archival workflows and digital preservation. The command line software discussed will help archivists navigate their terminals, find/ move/ rename digital objects, understand checksums and CRCs, create Bags per the BagIt specification, and introduce principles of scripting and automation for handling file data at scale.

This is an introductory course and users with no programming or command line experience are welcome; any archivist who routinely moves files, verifies metadata across systems, or works with audiovisual materials will learn techniques to improve their efficiency and gain familiarity with systems and workflows which take advantage of CLI capabilities. Users don’t need to have administrative privileges or the ability to install software on their local machines in order to participate. For users who can install software on their machines, there will be office hours prior to the workshop to go over any questions that arise as part of the setup (and instructions are provided at this link).

Instructor Bio

Brendan Coates is a gardener, musician, proud cat-parent, and member of the Los Angeles Tenants Union. He has been working to ensure the long-term stability and relevance of archival audiovisual materials since 2011, with a particular focus on oral histories, for which he’s contributed to programs at The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, The History Makers, and, currently, at the Computer History Museum. His background with historical AV also led him to the UCSB Library, where he headed the Special Research Collections digitization lab for four years, contributing to their cylinder program and The National Jukebox projects, among others. A lifelong interest in computers and aversion to boring work inspired him to start learning Bash and Python and integrating them into his professional life, and he’s just been on that path ever since. He’s a graduate of the University of Michigan’s School of Information (#HailToTheVictims), a winner of the James A. Lindner Prize for QCT-Parse, a winner of the IGF Nuovo Award with Cassie McQuater for his contribution to her web game Black Room, and an active member of The Association for Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) and the Oral History Association’s Archives Interest Group (OHAAIG).

Description:

As cultural production and communication have moved online, the need for archivists to document history in real time has become increasingly clear and urgent. Yet the scale and complexity of online information and media can be daunting, even as web archiving tools and practices continue to evolve. And while large institutions are able to devote staff to keeping pace with new technologies and their attendant ethical concerns, small-to-mid sized organizations frequently rely on archivists who already handle many other responsibilities for this work. How does one design a web archiving program that meets the demands of our time with the resources at hand?

This multi-day workshop is designed to provide an introduction to web archiving fundamentals and tools for archivists seeking to initiate web archiving programs within their organizations and communities that are grounded in ethical practices and scaled to their resources. Attendees will learn about current projects and advances in the field, and receive practical guidance on drafting collecting policies based on institutional mission and capacity. The second and third sessions will be devoted to hands-on instruction using open source tools with ample time for Q&A. Participants should come away with a firm grounding in the principles and tools needed to sustainably advocate, plan for, and implement web archiving in their institutions. No previous experience in web archiving is required.

Applicants must be able to commit to attending all 3 sessions.

Instructor Bios

Amye McCarther is an arts archivist and media conservator based in New York, where she currently serves as Archivist for the Dia Art Foundation and Past President of the Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York. Her experience has included directing archival programs and processing photography, film, video, and born-digital collections for museums and artist foundations, including Blank Forms, the New Museum, the Merce Cunningham Trust, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the Judd Foundation, the Whitney Museum, the Harry Ransom Center, the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s CALL Project, and others. Her media preservation projects have received grant funding from the Society of American Archivists, the CLIR Recordings at Risk program, and the Andy Warhol Foundation. 

Sumitra Duncan is head of the web archiving program at the Frick Art Reference Library. In this role she manages the web archiving program of the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC), which consists of the Frick Art Reference Library and the libraries and archives of the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. She co-founded and co-coordinates the Web Archiving Special Interest Group of the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA). She has previously led web archiving workshops for the Digital Preservation Outreach and Education Network (DPOE-N), the Frick’s Digital Art History Lab, the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO), the ARLIS/NA Annual Conference, and The New School’s Parsons School of Design. She holds an MSLIS from Pratt Institute with Advanced Certificates in Archives and Museum Libraries.