Reverend Jesse Jackson's march for jobs -- around the White House (1975). Thomas J O'Halloran, photographer. Library of Congress.
Webinars
AMIA believes our programming is strengthened with partnerships across institutions, geography, and areas of expertise so we can continue to strive for a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable approach to media preservation. We support the work of the Academy Digital Preservation Forum and look forward to new collaborations and partnerships. We invite practitioners of all backgrounds to participate, lead webinars, and give feedback to help us create the best possible educational opportunities for our community.
The mission of the Academy Digital Preservation Forum is to provide an online gathering place to bring together stakeholders and practitioners in the digital preservation of motion pictures to confront challenges, encourage information exchange, and stimulate productive work to address these challenges, with an eye to cultural as well as industry perspectives.
With the ascent of digital technology in the production, postproduction, distribution, and exhibition of motion pictures, and the concomitant decline in photochemical cinematography and practical disappearance of film projection, we want to engage with those with the greatest stake and influence to ensure that digital preservation is successfully achieved: filmmakers, studio executives, Academy members, archivists, operations professionals, technologists, and other practitioners charged with implementing digital preservation.
DAS Tech Talk | Machine Learning is Awesome …
… but it’s Still (and Always Will Be) About User Experience. It is about adding structure to unstructured data. That’s a big deal when we are working with Digital Archives. The good news is that now we have Machine Learning and its sophisticated algorithms that can label objects, recognize faces, transcript what is being said, detect landmarks, and much more. All of those piles up a good amount of metadata to be worked with. But metadata itself is not enough.
DAS 2020 | Welcome & Project Silica
In Project Silica we are exploring how to use fused silica (glass) as a media for future archival storage. It is an interesting media, as it is very robust and is not impacted by moisture, moderate temperatures, electromagnetic pulses and so forth. We store digital data in the glass and it does not suffer from bit rot and, and once stored in the glass, the data will be in the glass for ten thousand years! In the talk, I will cover glass as a long-term archival media, explain the properties of glass and how we create and read data in it and from it.
This foundational series provides an overview of bits and bytes, analog to digital conversion, audio, video, and film formats, digital data storage options, compression, and digital data preservation efforts.
DAS 2020 | Tech Talk & The Art of Media Preservation & Digitization
While it is widely known throughout the music industry that analog and digital tape recordings from the 1970’s through the 1990s pose numerous challenges to preservation often due to mishandling, improper storage, and composition, audio media can also be impacted by technology obsolescence and the natural degradation of the media due to the passage of time. The IMES audio archivist team has built a Media Recovery Technology (MRT) program to remediate all known forms of audio tape degeneration including mold, water damage, salt residue, sticky shed syndrome (binder hydrolysis), acetate spoking, lubricant loss, and many
more.
Smart Stacking II: Machine Learning and Information Science at PBS
This panel revisits the question of how to intelligently layer together the various data and information technologies currently on offer to answer real use cases, first explored at DAS 2018. PBS has partnered with GrayMeta Curio, Amazon and the PoolParty Semantic Web Company to test out how running content through machine learning mechanisms may enrich taxonomies, and how taxonomies may improve machine learning. For example, can a stacked process improve matching Sesame Street clips to given curriculum/development standards and serve PBS’s educational mission? The panel will present the results of the project, including issues raised and potential next steps.
Intro to Digital Preservation & FormatsWhen a reel of film or videotape breaks, we can examine the reel, diagnose the problem, and repair it. What about when digital files degrade? This webinar will provide an introduction to digital files—their structure, specifications, history, identification, and uses—and will explore potential fixes to “broken” files. Attendees will learn about the organization of data in common audiovisual storage formats, how to recognize those formats, and how to look closer at a file.
Applying AI and NLP Tools to AV Archival MaterialThis workshop addresses recent efforts in artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to help archives, libraries, and museums both manage and enhance their A/V content. Specifically, applications being developed within two multimedia AI platforms, AMP and CLAMS.
A DIY Approach to Data Recovery from Damaged 5.25” Floppy DisksAt RAND’s Corporate Archive, work is ongoing to recover data from a collection of damaged 5.25” floppy disks. The fragility of the medium itself poses unique challenges during the capturing process, and the end result is often that files are captured with minor or significant corruption. A single disk is captured 3 times in order to control for the variations in the capture process, but further preservation tasks on these files are inhibited due to the quality of some captures. This presentation will lay out the hardware and software tools, along with the cleaning methods for disks and drives, that I have found result in the most successful captures, while still being an affordable in-house DIY workflow. The presentation will also describe the ongoing work to “merge” the successfully captured information within files together into a “modified master” copy.