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A Time to Celebrate, A Time to Reflect: 25 Years of AMIA

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AMIA Trivia Night Trophy. Source: Erwin Verbruggen, CC BY-SA

Conference report from the 2015 AMIA conference in Portland, Oregon

The city of Portland, Oregon, on the upper west coast of the United States, was home to about 700 archivists last week. The occassion? The Association of Moving Image Archivists's 25th annual conference. For the technically inclined, it wasn't a novelty to be there. Only a few months earlier the Code4Lib conference took place in the very same hotel, so some attendees were already well accustomed to the hotel's colourful rugs (though none nearly as famous as the city's airport signpost carpet). 

AMIA is a vibrant community - if you're not on it already, it deserves the effort to triple your mailbox size by subscribing to the ever helpful mailing list the organisation hosts. Although the group's main geographical focus lies within the US, it covers a breadth of issues that are at play in the wider audiovisual archiving domain. Ahead of and during the conference, calls were made to ease conference attendance to smaller organisations and individuals by making steps to lower the cost of participation. A worthy initiative, that should help diversify both speakers and visitors at the conference. Still, the variety of topics and trends that arise from the event already is impressive. From workflows at big name production companies like HBO and Paramount to human rights video archiving and preservation technology development. Impossible to cram the four days into a sensible blog post, perhaps, but let me recount some of the highlights I stumbled upon. Apart from the conference, the association co-organises dedicated events such as the Reel Thing for film restoration, and the Digital Asset Management Symposium or DAS for... well, managing digital assets, both of which formed part of the conference's already packed curriculum.

Hacks & cracks

It's been five years since I last attended an AMIA conference and boy,  has it technified. Before the conference starts, a full day is dedicated to specific workshops and activities. Workshop topics included oral history, copyright and the digital humanities. As has been the case for the last few years, a number of archivists gathered at a local community organization to help them set up a catalogue of their media and implement an archival system. Some of the people involved run a remarkable and inspiring activity called XFR - pronounce as transfer - Collective, in which they set up shop at underrepresented collections to make sure their magnetic media gets digitized, providing not just basic materials (tape deck, Final Cut Pro) but also the expertise to help smoothe the process.

Participants at the AV Hack Day hacking away. Source: Erwin Verbruggen, CC BY-SA

On this day, the AV Hack Day found its third instance. This hackathon is intended to get a group of people together to provide quick solutions to some existing preservation challenges. In recent years, the hack day has improved digital preservation articles on the English Wikipedia, amongst other things. This year's hack day had a group working on adding metadata to DPX files - a picture format used in film scanning - , one working on OpenRefine data improvements and one that spent efforts to clarify the process of using command-line tool FFMpeg for non-specialists. The outcomes of the FF project can be found here and here. As an activity under the "hacking the docs" stream, Shira Peltzman and her team valiantly took up the task to provide feedback to the DPC's community feedback exercise on the widely used (but rarely understood) OAIS standard - and received the jury prize for "biting the bullet" for the community.

Access and Use

Keeping digital assets is of no use when they can't be seen or utilized by anyone, which is why Casey Davis from broadcaster WGBH and Johan Oomen from Sound & Vision organised a track taking place across two days, with lightning talks, showcases and examples coming from Europe (EUscreen), Israel (the Steven Spielberg archive), Singapore's city archives and the US (American Archive, an online collection of public broadcasting materials). It addressed topics such as how you could use analytics tools to track and overview the impact of your organisation, as well as platforms, tools, trips and tricks to make audiovisual heritage materials better accessible online. We presented some of the work we're doing at Sound & Vision, but many other panels were inspiring and/or discussion inducing. The stream was captured in live notes in a google doc and a stream of tweets, which we combined in a Storify, where we'll be adding the presentations to shortly.

Emulating and checking

The level of technical expertise of younger archivists entering the profession is, admittedly, awe-inspiring. The level of expertise archivists need to get a job was discussed amply in two interesting sessions that discussed the differences between various archiving programmes and the real needs of the profession. The courses that are there mostly seem to navigate towards the north- and western hemispheres, while the challenges for keeping the audiovisual record are global. The need for proper training was equally underlined at the CIADS UNAM conference I visited just the week before.

AMIA's educational committee has done some excellent work on producing webinars that can be followed from anywhere around the globe.

With Dave Rice and Ashley Blewer, I presented the work we're doing in the PREFORMA project. The timing was perfect. Just that morning, we heard that the Internet Engineering Task Force had approved the establishing of CELLAR, a working group on standardizing the format the MediaArea team are working on: the video codec FFv1 in an MKV wrapper. It's an important development to have fully open standards, with open tools that can support them. You can follow the development on the Preforma pages or join us for the workshop in Stockholm in April.

Quite a few presentations discussed audiovisual collections as broader than "just" linear sounds and moving images. Interactive works such as video games found their place in the Digital Asset Symposium. Charlotte C. Thai presented the NIST project with an impressive array of tools and workflow diagrams. Morgan presented Rhizome's embeddable emulator, which allows interactive media art works to be presented on different online environments. Quite an amount of participants came from the impressive NDSR residency programme, which allows organisations to have an embedded researcher for nine months. The researchers discussed all sorts of troubles they tackled in a panel on learning from mistakes - from the small and seemingly obvious to the complex: having enough power cords, making sure that nobody unplugs your main storage but also how to recover your unmarked files from an LTO. 

FFmprovisr presentation by Ashley Blewer. Source: Erwin Verbruggen, CC BY-SA

All in all, the week was throbbing and thriving and over before we knew it. I missed out on all of The Reel Thing and all of the work on keeping film formats alive some groups are working on, some fabulous home movie and orphan film sessions, but until we have a solution to emulate ourselves, we simply can't be everywhere all of the time. Until the next conference comes around: see you on the listserv!

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